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OUR COMMON SPEECH: 



SIX PAPERS 



ON TOPICS CONNECTED WITH THE PROPER USE 

OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE, 
THE CHANGES WHICH THAT TONGUE IS UNDER- 
GOING ON BOTH SIDES OF THE SEA, 
AND THE LABORS OF LEXICOGRAPHERS TO EX- 
PLAIN THE MEANING OF THE WORDS 
OF WHICH IT IS COMPOSED. 



BY 

GILBERT M. TUCKER. 



NEW YORK: 

DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY. 

1895. 




f9^oa^ 



1? 






Copyright, 1895, 
By Dodd, Mead and CaMPANV. 



All rights reserved. 



g^ntbersttg press: 

John Wilson and Son, Cambridge, U.S.A. 



CONTENTS. 



Page 
LocuTius IN Fabrica: an Admonishing Voice about 

Language, from a Workshop ; Words are 

Tools, and should be used as such .... i 

Degraded Words : Formerly employed in a 
Favorable or an Indifferent Sense, they 
now convey the intimation of reprehension, 
Contempt or Dislike; Why has the Change 
occurred? 32 

The Revised Version of the New Testament: 
Were the Translators *' Strong in Greek 
BUT Weak in English"? 78 

Old Dictionaries : Some of Their Character- 
istics AND Curious Features 95 

Modern Dictionaries; Which shall I Buy ? . . 112 

American English : How does the Average Speech 
of All Parts of the United States Compare 

WITH THAT OF ALL PaRTS OF THE BRITISH 

Isles? 151 

Alphabetical Index of English Words referred 

TO 235 



OUR COMMON SPEECH. 



LOCUTIUS IN FABRICA. 

Words are those Channels, by which the Knowledge 
of Things are conveyed to our Understandings : and there- 
fore, upon a right Apprehension of them depends the 
Rectitude of our Notions ; and in order to form our Judg- 
ments right, they must be understood in their proper 
Meaning, used in their true Sense, either in Writing 
or Speaking : For, if the Words of the Speaker or 
Writer, though ever so apposite to the Matter, be taken 
in a wrong Sense, they form erroneous Ideas in the Mind 
concerning the Thing spoken or written of ; and if we 
use Words in a false and improper Sense, this causes 
Confusion in the Understanding of the Hearer, and 
renders the Discourse unintelligible. — Introduction to 
Bailey'' s Dictio7iary, 

TN an office-building which I occasionally visit, 
^ is a dingy little room occupied as a shop 
by one of those useful men who can turn their 
hands to almost any mechanical t^sk, from 



Our Common Speech. 



repairing a fine clock to building a cow-shed, 
and do it well. To the casual observer, the place 
is far from beautiful, and has a '* cluttered-up " 
appearance, suggestive of habits the reverse of 
orderly. The floor — where not occupied by 
benches, lathes, horses, and a rusty stove sur- 
mounted by a glue-kettle — is nearly concealed 
by bits of timber, shavings, and miscellaneous 
debris. The walls are lined with shelves and 
racks of many shapes, sizes and colors, obvi- 
ously put up at different times, and constructed 
of odds and ends, with no thought of symmetry 
or harmony in their arrangement. And when 
one examines the tools themselves, they are 
found to form a collection almost equally pro- 
miscuous. No two have handles alike, or look 
as if they came from the same maker. They are 
disposed in rude stands, boxes and cases of ir- 
regular forms, which seem to have been hastily 
adapted to their present purpose, in default of 
anything better. Nothing could be more unlike 
the finely finished and ingeniously arranged 
" gentlemen's tool-chests '' that fascinate the 
eye of mechanically-disposed visitors in hard- 
ware stores. 



Locutius in Fabrica. 



Yet the occupant of this little shop can lay 
his hand in a moment on any article in it, by 
day or by night, and knows the contents as you 
know the alphabet. And when he puts any 
implement into service, it is found to answer 
its purpose to very perfection. The chisels cut 
like razors ; the saws follow the line without 
the deflection of a hair's-breadth ; the lather run 
exactly true ; the vices and clamps hold like a 
bad habit. For all their rude appearance, it 
would be hard to suggest any improvement in 
the practical working of this collection of hete- 
rogeneous apparatus. 

Now, I have often thought, while watching 
this mechanic at work, that his position (bar- 
ring, of course, any question as to relative de- 
grees of skill) is in some respects not unlike 
that of the writer of an English book. Is not 
our language, too, a seemingly disordered and 
inharmonious assemblage of implements, ap- 
pliances and raw material ? Our vocabulary is 
made up of importations from every country 
under heaven ; our present tenses and their pre- 
terites, our individual terms and their signifi- 
cance in idiomatic phrases, our spoken words 



Our Common Speech. 



and their representatives in writing, have in 
scores of cases about as much seeming con- 
gruity as my mechanical friend's delicate watch- 
making lathe with the dirty table on which it 
stands and the rough box that covers it. And 
yet, what work can be accomplished with the 
English language ! What distinction so fine, 
what conception so grand, what mental creation 
so lovely, that this unsymmetrical and in many 
respects unbeautiful tongue is inadequate (if 
one only knows how to use it) for putting it 
into permanent form for preservation? As a 
means for the expression of thought, our com- 
mon speech, in the hands of a master, excels 
the comparatively regular languages of anti- 
quity and of many savage peoples, as the 
mechanic's unattractive tools excel for practical 
purposes the handsome but untrustworthy con- 
tents of the ^* gentlemen's tool-chests." Less 
sonorous than German, less sparkling than 
French, less musical than Spanish, less logical 
and systematic by far in its structure than 
Latin, less flexible than Greek, how it surpasses 
them all for meeting the varied necessities of 
mankind ! 



Locutius in Fabrica. 



Now, does not this parallelism suggest a use- 
ful lesson to certain hypercritical critics whose 
wont it is to act the part of grand inquisitors 
as to the legitimacy of the new terms which are 
constantly appearing in our language, often to 
supply real and important wants? A great 
hubbub was made by this class of people on 
the introduction of the now well-established 
noun starvation, which even Mr. Skeat, not- 
withstanding his usual Hberality of judgment, 
condemns as a "' ridiculous hybrid/* Hybrid of 
course it is, — an Anglo-Saxon root with a Latin 
suffix; as if one should fit a rough hickory 
handle into a highly polished lignum-vitae mal- 
let. But, ridiculous ? Consider the circum- 
stances. The implement was badly needed; 
the materials of which it was constructed were 
the best at hand at the moment, or the best 
that were thought of; and it answers its pur- 
pose well. Can we afford to discard it because 
it is not handsome in appearance? Reliable 
has fallen under the ban of the same class of 
thinkers. It is badly formed, no doubt; but 
so, for that matter, is its parent, the universally 
accepted verb rely, and still more so the unchal- 



Our Common Speech. 



lenged noun relia^ice, consisting as this does of 
an English root with a French prefix and suffix, 
like an old, well-worn spoke-shave with a pair of 
bran-new handles. (As to the other objection 
to reliable^ — that we do not rely a thing, but rely 
tcpon it, and therefore the adjective ought to be 
rely-upon-able, — any comment may safely be 
deferred until people begin saying lavgh-at-able, 
indispense-with-able, and vnaccount-for-able ; the 
principle is the same.) Fault is perpetually 
found with talented, on the ground that parti- 
ciples ought not to be formed from nouns ; and 
perhaps they ought not, in a strictly logical 
and regular language ; but a tongue that al- 
ready includes diseased, gifted, lettered, bigoted, 
titrreted, landed, skilled, ivied, crannied, towered, 
blooded, cultured, acred, steepled, mitred, coped, 
tippet ed, booted, spurred, horned, tinpi^ineipled and 
widowed (not to mention innumerable com- 
pounds like fair-haired and pug-nosed^, will 
hardly suffer much by admitting other forma- 
tions of the same kind. The process is con- 
tinuing, and is bound to continue. A recent 
instance may be found in the cable despatch to 
the American press conveying the news of the 



Locutius in Fabrica. 



death of the last Duke of Marlborough. ** The 
dukedom," said the despatch, '' will be the 
heaviQst'dowa^ered title in the peerage/' The 
mere fact that these noun-participles are so 
freely formed and so generally accepted is al- 
most enough to establish their standing as good 
English, without argument ; in the formation of 
a language, whatever generally is, is right. But 
I think it may be successfully maintained that 
the objectors are wrong in their argument, 
too, for these participles, in fact, are regularly 
formed from a noun 7ised as a verb^ in accord- 
ance with what seems to be a fundamental law 
of the language, that any noun, without excep- 
tion, may be nsed as a verb zvhenever such use is 
necessary or convenient. Of course thousands of 
our nouns never have been, probably never will 
be, so used, — either because they have well es- 
tablished related verbs that answer the purpose ; 
or because considerations of euphony make it 
natural to turn them into the verb form by add- 
ing ize or making some other modification, when 
it is desired to make verbs of them ; or because 
their meanings are such that they are never 
wanted except as nouns. But I believe the law 



8 Our Common Speech. 

of liberty above stated will more and more com- 
mend itself as sound, the more it is tested by 
experiment.^ 

Not to protract the list of words that have 
been condemned because of their real or sup- 
posed irregularity of formation, we will only 
notice the class of which stand-point^ wash-ttiby 
shoe-horn^ cook-stove, go-cart and boot-Jack are 
examples, — a class of words which are set down 
as abominations, ^'slovenly and uncouth," by a 
popular writer on correctness in speech, because 
they do not conform in their structure to a 
somewhat complicated canon which he lays 
down as the law for making ** compounds of 
this kind." His argument is a complete non- 
sequitur. The laws relating to the develop- 
ment of a language are to be deduced from 
the history of that development, just as the 
so-called laws of nature are merely generalised 
statements of observed facts. And in regard 

1 Of course it does not follow that any English verb may be 
used as a noun. No such practice has ever prevailed ; no such 
practice is necessary or desirable for useful ends ; and any 
attempt to introduce it — as in creating monsters like " a com- 
bine " — deserves to be excommunicated with bell, book and 
candle. 



Locutius in Fabrica, 



to these expressions, which our acceptance of 
his canon would require us to condemn, it 
must be noticed that they are not only briefer 
(always an advantage), but actually clearer than 
those which the critic would substitute for them. 
The meaning of a cooking-stove, to be sure, is 
not greatly liable to misapprehension, nor per- 
haps is that of a washing-tub ; but booting-jack 
is open to the manifest objection that it is not 
for booting, but for un-booting, so to speak, 
that the implement is designed, while shoeing- 
horn suggests an entirely wrong idea: we do 
not speak of the process of dressing our feet 
as '^shoeing'' them; and what sort of a de- 
scription of the well-known nursery machine 
would it be to call it a " going-cart " ? 

The fact of the matter seems to be that 
though of course it is desirable that the devel- 
opment of the language should proceed on 
regular lines and in conformity with logical 
principles, it is by no means essential to the 
usefulness of a word that it should be thus 
formed ; and if only the word is useful, we 
can well afford to admit it to our already heter- 
ogeneous vocabulary, the vocabulary being all 



lo Our Common Speech. 

the more serviceable in many ways on account 
of the variety and lack of unity among its con- 
stituent parts. The important question in all 
such cases, looking at them from the mechani- 
cal point of view, is, have we need of this tool, 
and is it the best we can readily procure? If 
so, we shall be just so much the poorer for re- 
jecting it on account of its uncouth appearance. 
It ought to be remembered, indeed, that our 
list of words, numerous as it is, is yet not com- 
prehensive enough to fulfill the highest ideal 
of a perfect tongue. We need more tools, — a 
good many of them; and it sometimes seems 
a pity rather that we cannot manufacture and 
introduce them when the need is perceived, 
than that some of those we have, offend in 
their composition the strict requirements of 
congruity. We badly need, for instance, epi- 
cene pronouns in the singular, answering to 
they, them and tJieir in the plural. True it is, 
one can often use he, him, and his, expecting 
hearers or readers to remember that **the 
brethren embrace the sistern." True it also 
is, one can often get around the difficulty by 
rearranging a sentence ; but there is a diffi- 



Locutius in Fabrica. ii 

culty, for all that. A man wishes to say that 
each of his two children, a boy and a girl, has 
the exclusive use of a desk. He naturally 
begins : ** Each of my children has a desk to " 
— how shall he finish? It is not quite right to 
say that each has a desk to himself ^ or to her- 
self, and it is certainly far from grammatical or 
pleasing to say themselves. What shall he do? 
The problem is of daily occurrence, as any one 
will find who will take pains to watch for it. 

We need, too, a preterite for the verb must, 
and still more for the verb ought} We are 
compelled to say, ** You ought to have done 
such and such things,'' — which is by no means 
what we really mean. One cannot possibly be 
under obligation to have done anything, — the 
phrase is absurd; all obligation is to do, and 
it would be an important gain in the direction 
of clearness and conciseness if we might say, 
when speaking of past time, '' you oughted." 

We need, again, a w^ord almost synonymous 
with many, but having a slightly different shade 

^ Each of these words was itself anciently a preterite ; but 
they have been for centuries independent verbs, used only in 
a single tense, the present indicative. 



12 Our Common Speech. 

of meaning, — a lack which is often suppHed, 
awkwardly and incorrectly, by the use of numer- 
OILS with a plural noun. People say, ** There are 
numerous books on that subject," — which is 
hardly grammatical : there may be a numerous 
list of books, but that expression, correct in 
syntax, does not seem quite to express the 
idea; and to say there are many books may 
be rather too strong a statement. 

We need, once more, a verb for which replace 
is commonly substituted, there being nothing 
better at hand. One removes a painting from 
his wall and hangs up an engraving in its stead. 
For a brief statement of this action, we have at 
present nothing better than to say that the 
painting was replaced by the engraving. Yet 
this is really nonsense. To replace a thing is 
to put it back where it was before. Here, as 
in the case of numerous^ we may be said to 
lack a gimlet, and find ourselves compelled to 
bore holes, blunderingly and unsatisfactorily, 
with the blade of a penknife. 

Then there are not a few adverbs which one 
meets in foreign tongues, and finds so useful 
that he wonders at himself for never having 



Locutius in Fabrica. 13 

noticed the absence of corresponding words 
in English. FamiHar examples are freundlich 
and lioffentlich in German. One cannot say 
in English, ** He received me friendlily," con- 
venient as it would sometimes be to do so, 
neither kindly nor cordially quite answering the 
purpose. Nor can one say, '' The doctor has 
hopeably given the right medicine." If you 
presume he has done so, you may say pre- 
sumably; if you are sure of it, you have tm- 
doubtcdly; but if you only desire to express a 
pretty strong hope, you must cast your sentence 
in another mould. 

At the same time, we have certainly bad 
words enough, — bad, not because they are 
irregular in form or composed of incongruous 
elements, but because they are, for some other 
reason (adopting Noah Webster's sententious 
expression), ** nonsensical." Helpmeet is one of 
these monsters. The result of a stupid blunder 
in running together a noun and an adjective 
that stand separate in the familiar verse in 
Genesis, it can hardly be called a word at all ; 
it means nothing in particular, and is worse 
than useless. Dissever^ disannul^ jcnravel^ lesser^ 



14 Our Common Speech. 

and similar feeble attempts at unnecessary em- 
phasis, are other instances : sever, ammly ravely 
lesSy answer the purpose completely, with the 
advantage of smaller bulk; the addition of the 
extra syllable is like giving a gimlet two handles. 
Equally useless, for the most part, is the school- 
ma'amish insistence upon indicating, by the 
addition of ess, the feminine gender in a num- 
ber of nouns indicative of occupation or posi- 
tion. Sometimes, of course, the sex of the 
person referred to has a direct bearing upon 
her relations to her calling, as in the case of 
an actress, whom it is often doubtless well to 
discriminate, in speech as in thought, from an 
actor. But it can hardly be maintained that 
any such necessity exists in the case of a 
woman who may happen to be an editor, a 
postmaster, a manager, or a poet. Yet we read 
not unfrequently of editresses and postmis- 
tresses ; the dignified *' Westminster Review " 
finds poet not sufficiently distinct when the poet is 
a woman, and gives its sanction to poetess ; and 
the '' Illustrated London News," which often de- 
votes a considerable portion of one of its most 
entertaining departments to discussions of col- 



Locutius in Fabrica. 



15 



loquial English, its meaning and its proprieties, 
is actually guilty of manageress ! Here, as be- 
fore, the extra syllable is merely an incum- 
brance; we could not only get along just as 
well without it, we should actually do better. 

Another class of bad words — bad because 
they do not mean what they are supposed to 
mean — is exemplified in gasometer. The fact 
that it consists of a term invented in Belgium 
not much more than two hundred years ago, 
and a word from classical Greek, welded to- 
gether, nobody knows why, by the letter 0, — 
is of no consequence; but what is of conse- 
quence is, that it means a measurer of gas, and is 
understood as indicating a reservoir of gas. In 
the name of common-sense, when one means a 
gas-holder, why not say so ? Hydropathy y too, 
is a disgrace to the language. Homoeopathy 
(similar sickness) is correct, indicating as it 
does a method of treatment based on the belief 
that '' like cures like; " and allopathy (different 
sickness), though of course rather a nickname 
than a scientific term, may pass muster as desig- 
nating the practice that commonly relies on 
agencies which are found to reverse the symp- 



1 6 Our Common Speech. 

toms of the patient. . Hydropathy (water sick- 
ness) can only be accounted for by supposing 
that the inventor of the word imagined that 
it might mean water-^^r^, which of course it 
cannot. 

But by far the most important suggestion 
offered by the analogies of the little shop, relates 
to the folly of misusing our verbal tools; and 
just here is the one great point of dissimilarity 
between the English language and the equip- 
ment of my friend's workroom. A mallet may 
be highly polished as to its head, and rough- 
hewn as to its handle, and yet give entire 
satisfaction. But it would hardly work well 
on chisels, if the owner were in the habit of 
using it to drive nails. That is exactly what 
we not unfrequently do in speech ; and the natu- 
ral result follows: the nails are not driven 
straight, and we presently find that we have 
spoiled our mallet. A few examples will make 
the process clear. 

We speak of preposterous statements, mean- 
ing only that they are incoiTect or absurd. Now, 
preposterous is not properly synonymous with 
either of these adjectives, but has a definite 



Locutius in Fabrica. 17 

import of its own which can be expressed by 
no other word, signifying as it does the putting 
of something first which ought to be last, — the 
getting of the cart before the horse, as it were. 
We are badly compensated for losing the power 
of expressing this idea in a single word, by 
gaining a new and hardly distinguishable syno- 
nym for absurd. 

Then there is aggravating for exasperating. 
The distinction has been pointed out a thousand 
times. Everybody knows that to aggravate is 
to make worse. A man's crime may be aggra- 
vated by the circumstances; to say that the 
man himself is aggravated, means, not that he 
is annoyed, but that, being an evil at best, he 
is made a greater nuisance than he has been. 
Yet it is surprising how many influential writers, 
especially in England, insist on confounding 
the terms. Dickens does so over and over 
again in *^ Great Expectations " : '* The Romans 
must have aggravated one another very much 
with their noses ; " ^^ Mr. Wopsle's Roman nose 
aggravated me ; ** *^ This was so very aggrava- 
ting, the more especially as I found myself 
making no way against his surly obtuseness; " 

2 



1 8 Our Common Speech. 

*^ Words cannot state the amount of aggrava- 
tion and injury wreaked upon me by Trabb's 
boy." I read the other day in the ** Mark Lane 
Express" of persons who "jerk the reins in 
that aggravating manner." A pamphlet lately 
pubhshed in London, relating to a certain class 
of books in the British Museum, is entitled 
** Aggravating Ladies." The careful ** West- 
minster Review" says (October, 1881, page 
284, Scott edition), ** The selections from the 
* Giaour* are exceedingly aggravating." It must, 
however, be admitted that the blunder is not 
exclusively British, for whoever reads that ex- 
cellent book, *' The Calling of a Christian 
Woman," issued a few years ago by the Rev. 
Morgan Dix, S. T. D., rector of Trinity Church, 
New York, will find on page 22 a reference to 
" the words of St. Paul peculiarly aggravating 
to the ears of modern revolutionists." 

A mallet which has been so persistently used 
as a hammer by the legal profession, without 
sense or necessity, as to be pretty effectually 
ruined, is enjoin. It can hardly be needful 
to remark that to enjoin a course of conduct is 
to command that it be followed ; the lawyers, 



Locutius in Fabrica. 



oddly enough, have so perverted the meaning 
as to reverse it completely; in their dialect, to 
enjoin an act is to forbid it ! Thus I read in the 
** Albany Law Journal '' (vol. xxviii. page 43) that 
" in Leete v. Pilgrim Churchy St. Louis Court of 
Appeals, the ringing of church chimes between 
9 p. M. and 7 A. M. was enjoined. The court 
refused to enjoin the ringing for worship on 
Sunday or in the daylight hours, and continued : 
* But the striking of the clock at night must, we 
think, be relegated to the category of useless 
noises. . . . We therefore think that the strik- 
ing of the hours upon the largest bell between 
the hours of 9 P. M. and 7 A. M. ought to be 
enjoined * 'M Of course this means that while 
the court declined to order the ringing of the 
church bell on Sunday or by daylight during 
the week, it did command that the chimes 
should be faithfully operated between nine at 
night and seven in the morning. Of course 
also the writer of the paragraph, and the learned 
judge who prepared the opinion, intended that 
their words should mean the precise opposite. 
The mallet in their hands is absolutely spoiled 
for its legitimate purpose ; and to what possible 



20 Our Common Speech. 

profit ? Meaning forbidden^ why could they 
not '^diY forbidden ? Or if it is considered desir- 
able to have a special word to signify the formal 
forbidding of an action by a writ, far, far better 
would it be to raise to respectability a term 
which is now ranked with the vilest newspaper 
slang, and say that the action is *' injuncted." 
It may be answered that this horrible word, if 
it means anything, must be synonymous with 
enjoin; but the fact is, it has never been used 
except to signify forbidden by injunction ; and 
as for its irregular formation, one who cares 
more for the substance of the language, its real 
serviceableness in expressing thought, than for 
the refinements of grammatical science, will 
easily disregard that objection. The nail must 
be driven ; the only hammer we have is ** for- 
bid : " this, it seems, will not answer ; then for 
Heaven's sake let us pick up even a shape- 
less stone like *' injunct *' rather than spoil our 
excellent mallet '' enjoin." ^ 

1 A portion of this paragraph was printed in the *' Albany 
Law Journal '* (with editorial commendation) shortly after the 
publication of the legal opinion criticized, and elicited a number 
of indignant letters from lawyers, not one of which really 



Locutius in Fabrica. 21 

Among the great number of other verbal 
mallets which are often foolishly misused as 
hammers, the following may be mentioned. 

attacked the position above assumed. Their chief burden was 
to maintain that a man may properly be enjoined from doing 
a certain action, — which nobody disputed; the question (if 
there can be any question) is, whether one may say that *' the 
action is enjoined," meaning that the action is forbidden. One 
writer stated that *' neither the verb * to enjoin ' nor its sub- 
stantive * injunction ' is exclusively used, even in legal phrase- 
ology, in the sense of prohibition ; " nobody said it was : 
the point is, that it ought never to be so used. Another solemnly 
quoted — of all authorities in the world, on a question of 
verbal accuracy — Webster^ s Dictionary ! — as if everybody did 
not know that all kinds of error in speech which have obtained 
any sort of respectable currency can be defended (not '* autho- 
rised^'') by citations from that useful but bloated compilation. 
The editor of the " Law Journal," closing the discussion, 
summed up the whole matter thus : ** What Mr. Tucker com- 
plains of is that the same word is used to mean two exactly op- 
posite things, — to do and not to do. This verbal blowing hot 
and cold in the same breath is certainly indefensible. It is ' over- 
working' the verb, to quote Rufus Choate. We have plenty 
of good words to express the desired meaning, — 'prohibit,' 
'restrain,' 'forbid.' There is no need of corrupting and vul- 
garising the language by this double and ambiguous use. 
When we want to prohibit the ringing of bells, for example, 
let us not say it is ' enjoined,' i. ^., commanded ; nor worse yet, 
* enjoined and forbidden,' i. e.y both commanded and prohibited ; 
but let us say just what we mean in the correct use of the lan- 
guage, — forbidden and prohibited. We are no purist nor 



22 Our Common Speech. 

The Hst might be indefinitely extended, but it 
is the present purpose merely to illustrate the 
principle. 

Restive for uneasy, — Here is a word which 
shares with enjoin the remarkable misfortune 
of having been completely reversed in meaning 
by bad usage. A restive horse is a lazy horse 
that wants to rest, and by no means, as some- 
times seems to be supposed, a nervous horse 
that wants to go. 

Executive for secret^ in the phrase " executive 
session.'* It is generally understood that when 

' philological fancier/ but we think that this use of the word 
* enjoin' is radically wrong/' 

The practical result of the bad practice is strikingly illus- 
trated by an article which appeared in a Morgantown, W. Va., 
newspaper, the " New Dominion," of April 14, 1894, to which 
a friend calls attention as these pages are going to press. 
Relating a decision of the Supreme Court (presumably of 
the State) in the case of Lezvis Wilson v. The Town of 
Philippic the syllabus of the opinion is quoted as saying that 
under certain circumstances " a court of equity will not en- 
join the collection of a tax assessment on a town lot to pay 
for the construction of a sidewalk in front of the same, 
ordained by the council of an incorporated city or town." 
The reader perceives, of course, that it is impossible to know, 
except by inference from the context, whether eitjoin here 
means command ox forbid I 



Locutius in Fabrica. 23 

the Senate engages in what is properly enough 
called *^ executive business/* as the considera- 
tion of appointments or treaties, spectators are 
excluded ; and from this has arisen a ridiculous 
custom on the part of various voluntary associa- 
tions and committees of resolving to *^ go into 
executive session " when it is only meant that 
private business is to be taken up with closed 
doors. The blunder is doubtless largely due to 
the usual preference of ill-trained minds for fine 
and high-sounding words. 

Condign for severe, — Condign means suitable ; 
and the most trifling offences, if serious enough 
to require attention at all, should incur condign 
punishment just as truly as the greatest crimes. 

Fabulous for very great, — One may properly 
speak of the fabulous wealth of an impostor, 
meaning the property that he falsely pretends 
to have. But what nonsense it is, when one 
thinks of it, to say that a lady's jewels are of 
'' fabulous value," meaning that they cost a 
great deal of money ! 

Impertinent for insolent. — An impertinent 
remark is one that has no connection with the 
matter under discussion. But the use of the 



24 Our Common Speech. 

term ought not to be thought to imply any 
censure on the good manners of the speaker 
referred to, for the most courteous person in the 
world makes an impertinent remark whenever 
he introduces a new topic of conversation. To 
call the person ** impertinent," in any case, is to 
** mix things " badly. A person can no more 
be ''impertinent" than he can be irrelevant or 
disconnected. 

Temperajtce^ Sumptuary^ and Protective, — 
Without expressing any opinion as to the 
advisability of indulging in alcoholic beverages, 
one may properly denounce, from grammatical 
considerations only, the absurdity of speaking 
of a man who abjures them entirely, as '' strictly 
temperate,*' and the absurdity of characterising 
as ''sumptuary" the legislation which aims to 
regulate the sale of intoxicants. A man cannot 
be " temperate " with that which he does not 
use ; and " sumptuary " laws, which forbid men 
under certain circumstances to make certain 
purchases, — being intended for the financial 
benefit of the persons on whom they bear, — 
differ by the whole diameter of being from the 
laws about liquor-selling, which are not intended 



Locutius in Fabrica. 25 

at all for the benefit of the class to whom they 
apply, but are designed to restrict the injury 
which these men inflict upon others. And 
similarly, without expressing any opinion as 
to the wisdom of a national policy of limiting 
importations from foreign countries, one may 
point out that the name ** protective tariff," as 
applied to a tariff by which this result is 
brought about, is objectionable, for the reason 
that it begs the whole question at issue. Such a 
tariff restricts, limits. Whether it x^-dSiy protects 
anything, in any proper application of the term, 
is disputed. 

Dividend, — It may be worth while to call 
attention to the obvious fact that a dividend is 
that which is to be divided. A railroad's divi- 
dend, for instance, is a certain share of the 
profits, set aside by the directors for division 
among the stockholders. It is sometimes con- 
venient, of course, and perhaps not highly cen- 
surable, to speak of one of the proprietors as 
receiving ** his dividend," meaning his share of 
the dividend ; but it should be remembered that 
this expression is only justifiable as a rough sort 
of contraction, much like saying** governments" 



26 Our Common Speech. 

and ^^ railroads *' when one means government 
bonds and railroad securities ; and it is to be 
regretted that the definition of dividend in each 
of the two dictionaries most in use in this 
country is so worded as apparently to confuse 
dividend with quotient. Webster s, as usual, is a 
little worse than Worcester's. 

Circumstance for event, — We continually hear 
people say that they will *' relate a circumstance 
that occurred " under their own observation. A 
circumstance occur ! They might as well speak 
of the motionless scenery at a theatre as per- 
forming. The word properly used — to indicate 
(as the Latin grammars used to say of the abla- 
tive absolute) the *' time, cause or concomitants 
of an action, or the condition on which it 
depends *' — was extremely useful, and we are 
very poorly compensated for its loss by acquir- 
ing a new and hardly distinguishable synonym 
for ** event '' or '* incident!^ 

Demean for debase, — '' If you had once de- 
meaned yourself, what I have to say would 
come easy,'* says Gwen in *' A Yellow Aster." 
The person addressed had demeaned himself 
(well or badly) every moment of his waking 



Locutius in Fabrica. 27 

hours, all his life. The blunder seems to have 
arisen partly from an imagined relationship be- 
tween the verb demean and the adjective meany 
and partly from the fact that the verb is used in 
a good many rather familiar passages in old and 
standard writers, in such connection that debase 
would have made equally good sense. Recol- 
lection of the noun demeanor, which is certainly 
not synonymous with debasement, ought to be 
sufficient to correct the error. 

Merchant for tradesman or shopkeeper. — In 
the older and better use of the first word, it was 
strictly confined to persons who carried on for- 
eign traffic. To call retail dealers " merchants " 
is to multiply synonyms uselessly, at the cost of 
losing a very convenient distinction. 

Sustain for receive. — Chiefly in daily-paper 
language; ''the victim sustained a trifling bruise 
on his arm." Well, it would have been re- 
markable if he had not '' sustained " a wound 
of that description. The writer was, of course, 
trying to say that the person received the 
wound. How hard it is, sometimes, to be 
simple ! 

Liable for likely, — A wrongdoer is liable to 



28 Our Common Speech. 

punishment. To say that he is *' liable to 
escape," meaning that he is likely to escape, is 
to commit an error that is really comical in its 
absurdity, when one compares the true mean- 
ing of the sentence with the idea intended to 
be conveyed. The error, nevertheless, creeps 
sometimes into very good company. Julian 
Hawthorne is guilty of it — see *^Dust," chapter 
7, page 62 of Fords, Howard & Hulbert edition 
of 1883 : ^* Perdita was brought up as befitted a 
young lady liable to hold a good position in 
society." The ** Albany Law Journal" quotes, 
vol. 29, page 22, from an official English re- 
port, an account of a meeting *^ of all the judges 
liable to try prisoners." 

Monopoly. — The frequent and glaring misuse 
of this term is of no little importance, as it 
leads to confusion of thought and sometimes to 
very ill-advised political action. A monopoly 
is, of course, an industry that is protected from 
competition by legal enactment. Certain dema- 
gogues are doing their best to lead the unthink- 
ing multitude to apply the term to industries 
which are perfectly open to competition but 
in which, for one reason or another, nobody 



Locutius in Fabrica. 29 

cares to compete — a very widely different 
thing. The owner of a patent has a monopoly ; 
but the notion that railroading, banking or gas- 
making can be a monopoly, as long as all the 
world is at liberty to engage therein if it pleases, 
is at once grotesque and dangerous. 

The list stretches out indefinitely ; one knows 
not where to stop. It seems that on this 
subject, as on some others, there is verily need 
of line upon line, precept upon precept, here 
a little and there a good deal. Yet one word 
of caution must be added. The doctrine that 
words should not be used to convey ideas 
foreign to their real meaning, ought never to be 
so perverted as to interfere with their employ- 
ment in a secondary, derivative or figurative 
sense, the legitimate out-growth of their primary 
significance. A single illustration will make 
this clear. The verb to endorse means to put on 
the back of; and the United States post-office 
department took a mallet for a hammer with 
a vengeance when it informed the senders of 
registered letters, by a placard formerly dis- 
played in many post-offices, that such letters 
** require the name of the sender to be endorsed 



30 Our Common Speech. 

on the face of the envelope ! " ^ Endorsed on 
the face! The writer of this notice — who 
doubtless imagined that endorsed was merely 
a more elegant synonym for written — might 
as well speak o£ hoisting a load down. But no 
small quantity of what I venture to think rather 
wooden-headed criticism has been expended on 
the use of the same verb to signify approve or 
sanctiony as in the common expression, to endorse 
a candidate or a movement. It seems to be for- 
gotten that in the usual application of the term 
— the endorsing of a note or a check — we have 
always in mind, not only the fact that something 
is actually written on the back of the paper 
in question, but also and chiefly the far more 
important fact that the writer of the endorse- 
ment, in putting down his name, agrees to 
warrant and defend the holder of the document 
against loss resulting from his confidence in it. 
In other words, he may be said to back up the 
original maker. And just as it is indisputably 
good English to speak of a man's friends as 

1 It was in consequence of representations by the author 
of this paper that the post-office department corrected the 
absurdity referred to. 



Locutius in Fabrica. 31 

backing him, so is it absolutely good English 
to speak of a lawyer endorsing a layman's 
opinion about a legal question, or a scholar 
endorsing the positions maintained in a book 
on classical subjects. To object to such use of 
language as this, is to push grammatical criti- 
cism to an extreme that is likely only to render 
it ridiculous, though if the critics could persuade 
the people to follow them, it would result in a 
senseless limitation of our choice of words — a 
real and by no means inconsiderable injury to 
the language. 



DEGRADED WORDS. 

Note, I beseech you, the many words which men have 
dragged downward with themselves, and made more 
or less partakers of their own fall. Having once an 
honorable significance, they have yet with the dete- 
rioration and degeneration of those that used them, or 
of those about whom they were used, deteriorated 
and degenerated too. How many, harmless once, have 
assumed a harmful as their secondary meaning ! How 
many worthy have acquired an unworthy ! — Archbishop 
Trench, 

TT is a fundamental principle in philology, 
-^ perhaps the fundamental principle, that 
the words of a living language are constantly 
changing in their significance, or at least in 
the precise sense in which by common consent 
their originally recognized significance is gen- 
erally taken. Particularly is this true of our 
comprehensive, flexible, elastic mother tongue, 
of which the manifold and widely diverse 
sources of derivation are hardly more varied 
than the directions in which it is apparently 



Degraded Words. ^3 

susceptible of ready modification and almost 
self-impelled development. The process of 
alteration in the materials of our every-day 
speech, however, like the action of the geolo- 
gic forces by which the crust of the earth on 
which w^e tread is in our own time undergoing 
not less real though perhaps less rapid trans- 
formation than during the earlier ages, is at 
once so gradual, and seemingly so natural and 
inevitable, that we hardly take note of its 
occurrence; and in the one case as in the 
other, it might not be difficult, in the absence 
of information to the contrary, to imagine that 
all the important changes were made long, 
long ago, and that the condition of aff'airs with 
which we happen to be familiar had been for 
a considerable period definitely established, 
and is likely to descend, about as we find it 
and leave it, to remote posterity. Yet one 
cannot devote the slightest attention to the 
subject without perceiving that the truth is 
quite otherwise — that as the torrents are 
constantly furrowing and gradually reducing 
the mountains, and as the great rivers are 
ever pushing out their deltas into the sea, so 

3 



34 Our Common Speech. 

are the necessities, and the practices, neces- 
sary or not, of our civilized life, every day 
extending, diminishing, or in some way modi- 
fying, the scope and import of the words we 
use. Some familiar terms are parting com- 
pany by degrees with their literal meaning, 
retaining only their derivative sense, like the 
verb transpire^ now very rarely used of mate- 
rial things, but defined by Johnson a century 
ago as meaning, first, " to be emitted by 
insensible vapor," and only secondarily " to 
escape from secrecy to notice," with the 
remark that the latter sense is *' lately inno- 
vated from France, without necessity." ^ Other 
words, formerly very general in their sig- 
nificance, have become limited by custom to 
a particular subdivision of the large class of 
objects they once denoted, like the noun 
catthy which not long ago included all beasts 

1 Judging of the future by the past, it would not be sur- 
prising — though much to be regretted — if the still more 
recent use of transpire as synonymous with occur^ which has 
already effected its entrance into the dictionaries (not into 
the language of careful speakers), should come in time, not 
only to full equality with the present meaning, but even to 
supersede it. 



Degraded Words. 35 

of pasture but is at present, in this country 
at least, commonly restricted within the limits 
of a single genus. Another group, moving 
in precisely the opposite direction, have within 
recent times superadded a new quality to 
the meaning they formerly embraced, such 
for instance as the word admiration^ which 
now means wonder combined with strong 
approval, but is used by the translators of 
the Bible, in Revelation xvii. 6, for wonder 
decidedly without approval, St John being 
made to tell us that he looked " with great 
admiration " upon the woman drunken with 
the blood of saints and martyrs. Others 
again, and no small number, have gradually 
made their way upward in the scale of re- 
spectability, ridding themselves by degrees 
of the shade of evil association that once 
rendered them objectionable — such for in- 
stance as fim, which the old lexicographers 
brand as a *' low, cant word,'' indicative of 
something quite different from the innocent 
merriment for which we now regard it as a 
synonym. Others finally, like the verb to 
let, having formerly represented two different 



36 Our Common Speech. 

roots of entirely different meanings, have 
gone utterly out of use as regards one of 
them, retaining perhaps the signification that 
was originally the less familiar of the two. 

But in this tossing ocean of a language, 
where the constituent waves are ever rising 
and falling, advancing and receding, altering 
their relative positions, and changing in their 
forms and aspects, there is plainly to be dis- 
cerned, nevertheless, the existence of certain 
well marked currents; and it is one of these 
currents that it is the purpose of this chapter 
inadequately and for brief distance to endea- 
vor to trace — namely, the group of changes 
which keep a record of the follies, weaknesses 
and common faults of humankind, and the 
daily trials and disappointments that flow 
from them; the alterations in the meanings 
of words which are plainly due to the unwise 
or culpable practices of those who use them. 
Many of the facts referred to for illustration 
are of course familiar — so familiar indeed 
that it is rarely possible to give credit to the 
authors who originally noted them. 



Degraded Words. 37 



To take as the first instance a case where 
the change is still in progress, there is the 
adjective pitiful^ which at present we almost 
invariably employ in an evil sense. **A piti- 
ful subterfuge," we say; that is, a transpar- 
ent and contemptible attempt at fraud. Yet 
the dictionaries with one accord give the 
good meanings precedence, — either ** melan- 
choly, moving compassion, deserving to be 
pitied" (exemplified in the watchman's ejacu- 
lation, ** pitiful sight ! " on discovering the 
dead body of Juliet), or else '' full of pity, 
tender," as in the three instances in which 
only the word occurs in King James' Bible. 
It needs no conjecture to discover the reason 
and method of this gradual drifting in mean- 
ing from good to bad. Whoever has heard a 
** pitiful " story of his woes from a wandering 
solicitor of charity, and, moved with compas- 
sion, has looked into the case only to find 
an impudent attempt at deceit, has the ex- 
planation before him in characters which he 



38 Our Common Speech. 

may run that readeth. The *' pitiful" story 
becomes provocative of scorn and indigna- 
tion ; and the ignominy of the transaction 
attaches itself to the word that described its 
first appearance, dragging down with it the 
innocent adjective, and fitting it for compan- 
ionship with actions and conditions diametri- 
cally opposite to those with which it originally 
found place. 

If misery loves company, there is no lack of 
consolation iox pitiful^ in this unfortunate rele- 
gation to infamous uses. At least four other 
adjectives have travelled far in the same direc- 
tion and by much the same route — apparent^ 
ostensible^ plausible and specious. The first of 
these commonly (not always, the transforma- 
tion as yet being incomplete, but commonly) 
carries with it in these days at least an insinu- 
ation that the thing to which it is applied is 
not really quite what it seems — that we must 
not be surprised in fact if the truth of the 
matter turns out to be very different from its 
apparent condition. This insinuation is, so to 
speak, a fungus of comparatively recent growth 
upon the real meaning of the word, gradually 



Degraded Words. 39 

fostered beyond doubt by a series of painful 
discoveries. Bailey's whole definition of ap- 
parent^ in 1764, was *'that plainly appears, 
certain, evident, manifest, plain, visible.'' Thus 
we still say an ^' heir apparent," meaning an 
heir beyond question or dispute, but as far as 
common usage is concerned, we should hardly 
employ a word like certam as a synonym of 
apparent^ the present practice being rather to 
consider the two adjectives as almost contra- 
dictory of each other. Closely similar is the 
history of ostensibley which was formerly under- 
stood in its etymological meaning, ** capable of 
being shown/* but now conveys, as the Encyclo- 
paedic dictionary says, ^' the idea of sham or 
pretence.'' As regards plausible and speciouSy 
they are manifestly only the English forms of 
the Latin plansibilis and speciosus} of which 
the first indicated primarily the possession of 
qualities deserving of applause, as ^^ plausibilis 
nomen " in Cicero ; while speciosus is commonly 

1 These words, like many others of classical derivation, came 
into English, not directly, but through living European lan- 
guages, chiefly the French ; but that fact is of no consequence 
for the present purpose, so long as they have preserved enough 
of their original form to be recognized as the same. 



40 Our Common Speech. 

best rendered by such expressions as *' having 
a good shape, beautiful, handsome, fine or 
splendid/' What a commentary it is upon the 
proverbial deceitfulness of appearances in this 
uncertain world, that these terms, which really 
indicate that a thing seems to be all right, have 
come to convey so sharply the implication that 
it is all wrong ! 

There is a noun too that started earliest of 
all in the same descensus Averni, and has long 
since reached a point so low that its hereditary 
claim to respectability has been almost for- 
gotten. This is hypocrite^ the Greek '1litokpit7)<^ 
in a modern dress — and ^TiTOKpiTrjf;^ as every- 
body knows, meant originally nothing but a 
player or actor. Roscius, the elegant speaker 
and beloved instructor of the greatest Roman 
orator, was by virtue of his art a hypocrite. 
Plainly the first step downward was taken when 
the word began to be used figuratively — when 
men were called hypocrites (in English or 
Greek) because their life was found to resemble 
the histrionic art in striving to appear to be 
different from what it was. It cannot have 
taken the common-sense of mankind long time 



Degraded Words. 41 

to perceive that such dissimulation is almost 
always for evil purposes — the sheep's raiment 
covering the ravening wolf. And so it has 
come to pass that when we wish to indicate 
the assumption of virtue for the intents of vice, 
the word that springs most readily to the lips 
is the once well-thought-of '' hypocrite/' 

To counterfeit^ likewise, was formerly only 
to imitate, conveying no insinuation as at 
present that the imitation was designed to be 
fraudulently substituted for the original — this 
added insinuation having been developed by 
the same process as the present evil signifi- 
cance of the word hypocrite. To eqtdvocate 
was merely to call two things by the same 
name, not necessarily to mean one while lead- 
ing the hearer to understand the other. Tijtsel 
was really woven of the precious metals, or 
supposed to be, until the detection of oft- 
repeated frauds caused it to be taken for 
granted that the appearance of exceptional 
richness and value in ornamental trappings of 
this material is nothing but the appearance, 
without reality. 

Finally under this head should be mentioned 



42 Our Common Speech. 

the group of words most characteristic in their 
present meaning of the special vice of dehber- 
ate attempt at deception — the wQvh p7'etend diwd 
its derivatives. To say nothing of the innocent 
meaning indicated by their Latin origin, it is 
not so very long since they were used in 
English without any evil implication. Ash, 
1775, mentions among his definitions of the 
verb, ** to claim, to demand as right," and gives 
** a claim " as the first equivalent of the noun 
pretension. Johnson informs us that a pre- 
tender is ''one who lays claim to anything" — 
that, and nothing more. A claimant, whether 
justly or unjustly, was in his view a pi'etendery 
and the butcher Orton, had he lived in England 
a century earlier, might have been spoken of 
as '' pretending to be Sir Roger Tichborne " 
without the slightest intimation on the part of 
the speaker that the story was not beheved. 
In the third part of King Henry Sixth, pub- 
lished 1623, Shakspeare makes Sir John Mont- 
gomery demand of King Edward at the gates 
of York, '' why shall we fight, if you pretertd no 
title?" and in the same breath, ''if you'll not 
here proclaim yourself our king, I '11 leave you 



Degraded Words. 43 

to your fortune " — using pretend almost inter- 
changeably W\\h proclaim, Milton indeed, forty 
years later, wrote, ^* this let him know, lest, 
wilfully transgressing, he pretend surprisal '' 
{Paradise Lost, v, 244), and elsewhere uses the 
word in the same manner; but the innocent 
meaning has lingered in literature for nearly 
two centuries longer. As historically applied 
for instance to the son and grandson of James 
II. of England, it can hardly have been orig- 
inally intended to signify much more than 
claimant ; for the unfortunate princes made no 
attempt at representing themselves to be any- 
thing but what they were, though they un- 
questionably laid claim to a kingly dignity that 
the nation was not anxious to concede to them. 
In the denoument of Lord Lytton's masterpiece, 
*' My Novel," to take an instance within our 
own times, it may be remembered that Peschiera, 
in his scathing exposure of the villainy of 
Randal Leslie, speaks of him as '' pretending '' 
to the hand of Violante ; and though there was 
certainly no love lost between the two worthies 
at that juncture, yet the context makes it clearly 
evident that this particular word is intended in 



44 O^^ Common Speech. 

no reproachful sense — the dashing count meant 
only to represent the minor scoundrel as his 
rival, seeking what he himself sought, and by 
much the same means, and pretend in his 
mouth is the exact equivalent of aspire. Yet 
who does not feel, now-a-days, the more than 
suggestion of a charge of fraud that is conveyed 
when we speak of any one as ** pretending,'* or 
as being a ** pretender '' ? — and indeed Webster, 
reversing the earlier order of definitions, renders 
the noun as meaning, first, *' one who simulates 
or feigns," and only secondarily, ** one who lays 
claim,'' in which he doubtless interprets cor- 
rectly our modern usage. What deduction can 
we draw from such a progression in meaning 
toward the bad but this — that it has been the 
common experience that people are apt to claim 
more than their due? 

There is yet one more word that may per- 
haps be considered as allied to the foregoing, if 
the history of its changing sense, as given by 
Barclay — an author of no great fame, who 
nevertheless managed to gather a good deal of 
curious and interesting matter — is true. This 
is legendy of which he says, writing about ninety 



Degraded Words. 45 

years ago, that it was originally " a book in the 
church containing the lessons that were to be 
read in divine service; from hence the word 
was appHed to the histories of the lives of the 
saints, because chapters were read out gf them 
at matins, but as the * golden legend,' compiled 
by James de Varase about the year 1290, con- 
tained several ridiculous and romantic stories, 
the word is now used to signify any incredible 
or unauthentic narrative." That is to say, 
legends, books highly esteemed, have been so 
often found to contain glaring falsehoods — for 
it can hardly be that the change is wholly 
attributable to the single instance mentioned 
by our author — that the very word which used 
to denote only that the composition to which it 
was applied ought to be read, now serves rather 
to warn the reader that it ought not to be 
believed ! 

11. 

Another common fault with our not-too- 
truthful humanity, nearly allied to the practice 
of exaggerating one's own deserts and conceal- 
ing blemishes, is that of unduly depreciating the 



46 Our Common Speech. 

merits of other people, and particularly of de- 
spising beyond reason such classes of the com- 
munity as we think below us ; and this habit, as 
might be anticipated, has made its mark upon 
our language. There are a number of words 
that formerly indicated little more than inferior 
social or political position, but which have come 
to embody the charge of something much worse. 
Thus a villain was at first, as Trench puts it, 
only a serf or bondsman *' {yillamis), because 
attached to the villa or farm ; '' and secondly 
** the peasant who, it is taken for granted," [and 
this is the root of the matter] "will be churlish, 
selfish, dishonest, and of evil moral conditions, 
these having come to be assumed as always be- 
longing to him, and to be permanently associ- 
ated with his name, by those higher classes of 
society who in the main commanded the springs 
of language. At the third step, nothing of the 
meaning which the etymology suggests, noth- 
ing oi villa, survives any longer; the peasant is 
quite dismissed, and the evil moral conditions of 
him who is called by this name alone remain." 
Thus Barrow rather superciliously remarks that 
foul language *' is termed villainy, as being 



Degraded Words. 47 

proper for rustic boors, who, having their minds 
debased by being conversant in meanest affairs, 
do vent their sorry passions in such strains." 

The term boor^ just quoted, was likewise origi- 
nally descriptive of nothing worse than *' a hus- 
bandman,'* *' a plowman," '' a country fellow," 
and the word or its Hollandish representative is 
still applied, without offence, to the wealthy and 
presumably well mannered Dutch planters of 
South Africa. A churl was a free tenant at will, 
or, as some trace the derivation, only a per- 
son of remarkable physical prowess. A keiit 
was a footman or foot-soldier of rural extraction. 
A pagan (to quote Trench again) was '' first 
a villager, then a heathen villager, lastly a 
heathen." Heathen itself meant originally only 
a dweller on the heath or open country. Inci- 
vility \^d<.^ merely the customary behavior, in the 
eyes of city residents, of their somewhat unpol- 
ished acquaintances from the interior; and the 
epithet savage indicated for a long time nothing 
more than relationship to the forest, or at worst 
a wild or uncultivated state, without the impli- 
cation of anything like ferocity. This must 
have been Milton's conception when he wrote of 



48 Our Common Speech. 

a ** savage hill/' and a ^'savage wilderness;" 
and Dryden's too, who speaks of *' savage ber- 
ries of the wood.'* 

Not only, however, are dwellers in towns ad- 
dicted to under-estimating their brethren of the 
fields, but the smaller minds of every country 
are apt to consider their land the flowery king- 
dom, and to despise unreasonably the outside 
nations. The prevalence of this folly is well 
illustrated by the present degradation of the 
adjective outlandish^ which ought of course to 
mean only foreign, as it plainly did in the seven- 
teenth century, when Translator-General Hol- 
land, rendering Pliny into English, made him 
refer to *' outlandish wheat." The uncouth, 
also, was once merely the unknown or unfamil- 
iar ; a vagabond or a harlot was a wanderer or 
stranger, not necessarily of disreputable char- 
acter; and a barbarian ^ in Greek, was a man of 
different nationality from the speaker. 

Idiot meant originally in English, as in its 
native tongue, only a private person, or at worst 
an unlearned man, these two constituting the 
whole definition given by Bailey, except when 
used as a technical term in law. Jeremy Tay- 



Degraded Words. 49 

lor, in the middle of the seventeenth century, 
remarked that *' humility is a duty in great ones 
as well as in idiots; " and Blount, a contempo- 
rary of the good bishop, says: ** Christ was 
received of idiots, while he was rejected and 
persecuted by the priests, doctors and rabbis." 
From this meaning, however, the word speedily 
descended to the level of the lowest classes in 
society; then came to indicate dense and stupid 
ignorance, and finally attached itself to persons 
absolutely void of understanding, natural fools, 
innocents or simpletons, as Webster has it. One 
can imagine the effect, in these days, of a min- 
ister's addressing his congregation as composed 
in part of idiots ! 

The appellation caitiff, which implies at pres- 
ent, and has done so for a long time, the pos- 
session of certain highly uncommendable traits 
of character, is traced by Johnson to the Italian 
cattivOy a slave, '' whence,'* says the doctor, ** it 
came to signify a bad man, with some implica- 
tion of meanness," and he adds : *' A slave and 
a scoundrel are signified by the same words in 
many languages." 

The adjective vulgar^ again, was once almost 
4 



50 Our Common Speech. 

synonymous with such innocent terms as gen- 
eral, pubhc, and even national. A mob was not 
much more than the common people, the crowd, 
having only in recent times come to imply, 
adopting Worcester's expression, " a crowd ex- 
cited to some violent or unlawful act/' the select 
few always recklessly imputing evil purposes 
to the many who they think should rank be- 
low them. Base, meaji and lewd were terms 
applied of old to the mass of the population, 
as distinguished from the gentry or clergy, and 
indicated nothing worse than this. Spenser 
writes, in the Faerie Queene : 

'-^ But virtuous women wisely understand 
That they were born to base humility, 
Unless the Heavens them Hft to lawful sovereignty." 

In one of Latimer's sermons, we read: ^' It 
might please the king to accept into his favor 
a mean man, of simple degree and birth, not 
born to any possessions." As for lewd, it seems 
to be only a variation of lay, a lewd fellow being 
etymologically merely a layman. So Chaucer, 
in the Canterbury Tales : 

'' For if a priest be foul, on whom we trust, 
No wonder is a lewid man to rust." 



Degraded Words. 51 

But the rich and the learned have been tempted 
so often to despise and slander the poor 
and the ignorant, these adjectives have been 
coupled so commonly with injurious aspersions, 
that we now insult a man, however humble his 
station in life, if we call him base, mean or 
lewd. 

A process of degradation, not dissimilar 
from the foregoing in its operation, has been 
effected within comparatively recent times also 
on the noun beast and its derivatives, it seem- 
ing to have been found impossible for rational 
man to speak of his less highly endowed fellow 
creatures without some tinge of scorn grad- 
ually attaching itself to the name by which 
he calls them. The ^* beasts " of the Apoca- 
lypse are plainly only living beings different 
from men; and in Wiclif's version of First Co- 
rinthians, five hundred years ago, we find : ** It 
is sown a beastly body; it shall rise a spiritual 
body." 

The term knave^ like the German kiiabe, 
meant at first only a boy, well or ill behaved. 
In Wiclif's Apocalypse, the woman clothed 
with the sun is represented as giving birth 



52 Our Common Speech. 

to *^ a knave child ; " and when Shakspeare 
wrote *' good knave '* (in Twelfth Night), and 
*^ gentle knave " (in Julius Csesar), there was 
nothing incongruous in the expressions. Next 
it indicated a servant; there is said to be an 
early version of the New Testament in which 
the Apostle Paul is styled ** the knave of Jesus 
Christ ; " and it is doubtless in the sense of a 
serving man or attendant to the king and queen 
that the name was given to the card at whist. 
Indeed the knave is called " le valet " in French 
to this day, — valet^ by the way, being only 
the modern form of the old Gallic variety our 
English varlet. The words caitiff, knave and 
varlet came, however to designate not only a 
servant but a cowardly or roguish servant, and 
in process of time the original signification has 
been quite lost sight of, nothing remaining of 
the poor despised dependents but the evil odor 
of their supposed bad morals. 

A blackguard, moreover, was merely a scul- 
lion, — that is, the '' black guard " was the 
company of such servitors, who accompanied 
persons of quality on their journeys, to take 
care of the pots and kettles; and the ancient 



Degraded Words. ^^ 

acceptation of the term involved no necessary 
conception of ruffianly manners. 

A menial was one of the household or mes- 
nee; minion was only a favorite, the French 
mignon. A brat was simply a child, however 
lovely; and an imp was a young person, a 
minor, particularly, it would seem, a young 
heir. To imp is to engraft, and the imps of 
a family were what we now, adopting precisely 
the same figure, call the scions. Tusser writes, 
in " Good Husbandry,'* 1557: 

** Take heed how thou layest the bane for the rats, 
For poisoning thy servant, thyself, and thy brats." 

It is stated that one of the earls of Warwick, 
who died in boyhood, is commemorated in a 
mortuary inscription in the chancel of the 
parish church as ** the noble imp ; " and Bacon, 
in his *^ Pathway unto Prayer,'* exhorts his 
readers to '^ pray for the preservation of the 
king's most excellent majesty, and for the pros- 
perous success of his entirely beloved son, 
Edward our Prince, that most angelic imp." 

Now it may be, of course, that a part of the 
new turpitude which has gradually attached it- 



54 Our Common Speech. 

self to all these words — villain, boor, churl, 
kern, pagan, savage, vagabond, harlot, barba- 
rian, idiot, caitiff, vulgar, mob, base, mean, lewd, 
beastly, blackguard, minion, brat, imp, and 
others like them — is attributable to the actual 
discovery of unexpected vices in the classes to 
whom they primarily referred ; but it seems 
more probable that the terms have become 
odious chiefly because of their constant appli- 
cation to those unfortunates whom their betters 
have thought it proper to regard with some 
measure of systematic contempt. In either 
case, the changes in meaning that the whole 
group have undergone, constitute certainly a 
very striking instance of the power of degra- 
dation which man's bad habits are constantly 
exerting upon the structure of the language 
that he uses. 



III. 

But it must not be supposed, nevertheless, 
that all the despising, all the calling of hard 
names, is to be attributed to the upper ten. 
A moment's reflection will discover that the 



Degraded Words. 55 

children, the learners, and inferiors of various 
grades, have been active, on their part, in bring- 
ing about a similar humiliation for the words by 
which they designate both the persons and the 
opinions of their rulers and instructors. Here 
however, as in the preceding case, there has no 
doubt been fault on both sides. Had the 
teachers of youth never assumed a degree of 
knowledge beyond their actual attainments, the 
words pedant and pedagogue^ both perfectly in- 
nocent in their etymology and once inoffensive 
in their use, might never have come to convey 
the implication of owlish self-conceit. Had 
the schoolmen of the middle ages devoted a 
larger share of their attention to the acquisition 
of really useful and practical knowledge, and 
exercised their wits less exclusively with ** subtill 
quiddities,** the name of their great exem- 
plar. Duns Scotus, might never have been cor- 
rupted, in form and meaning, into our modern 
dunce. Had the expounders of scientific discov- 
ery, and the preachers of religion, been invari- 
ably careful to confine their inculcations within 
the limits of certain truth, and to allow to their 
disciples the exercise of untrammeled reason in 



56 Our Common Speech. 

weighing the doctrines they were expected to 
accept, the term theory^ which ought to denote 
a reasonable opinion logically deduced from 
a sufficient number of established facts, might 
never have sunk so near to becoming a syno- 
nym of the wildest guessing; and dogma, which 
properly indicates only a tenet or principle of 
belief, might never have carried with it the im- 
putation of obstinate and unwarranted assertion. 
Had students really in possession of superior 
knowledge employed it more generally for the 
benefit of their fellow-men, rather than to bewil- 
der and delude them, the term wizard (a wise 
man) might never have descended to equiva- 
lency with charlatan and impostor. 

Had absolute rulers, again, exerted their au- 
thority mainly for the good of their subjects, 
the appellations tyrant and despot might still 
have been free from more than shade of censure 
that now clings to them. Tyrant, indeed, began 
very early to imply reproach, and in Latin is 
commonly used in the same unfavorable sense 
as in English, but in Greek we find it applied to 
the mild Pisistratus. Despot, it will be remem- 
bered, was frequently employed in antiquity as 



Degraded Words. 57 

a respectful form of address in approaching a 
monarch. Thus in Herodotus' account of the 
debate in the Persian cabinet over the invasion 
of Greece, the statesman Mardonius, beginning 
the speech that ''smoothed over '* the opinion 
of Xerxes, calls him ^'^12 SeaTrora** — rather in- 
adequately rendered by Gary, *'sir." And in 
much later times, if the tradition preserved by 
Dollinger in his '' Myths of the Middle Ages " is 
to be beUeved, the announcement, '^"Apprjv rjiilv 
io-TLV 6 Seo-TTorr]^/' constituted an essential for- 
mality in the enthronement of the popes. In no 
such case as this, can the Greek progenitor of 
our English despot be supposed to convey any 
uncomplimentary notion. The modern concep- 
tion of selfish and cruel oppression that is now 
so firmly united with the definition of either of 
these words, is doubtless the outgrowth at once 
of the bad use of unlimited authority on the 
part of the average ruler, and of the proneness 
of the average subject to cast what opprobrium 
he can and dares upon the powers that be. 



Our Common Speech. 



IV. 

Turning now to words relating to the pas- 
sions and appetites, we shall find several whose 
altered meanings tell plainly the story of re- 
peated indulgence in wrong directions, or at 
least of grovelling tastes. The degradation of 
the word paramour^ formerly used by Spenser 
and others in a perfectly innocent sense, and 
the vulgar misuse sometimes to be noticed of 
the beautiful word lovc^ which ought to express 
one's feelings toward his child, his wife, his 
mother, or his God — the misuse of this word 
by connecting it with the names of things 
we eat — are cases in point. To carouse ^ again, 
was once only to drink, with however great 
a degree of decorum and propriety. ** The 
queen carouses to thy fortune, Hamlet/' so pro- 
claims that august lady in the last scene of the 
tragedy, referring plainly to the taking of a 
single glass, by way of formal compliment. But 
as our affections are so apt to be set upon things 
that perish with the using, and as the enjoyment 
of intoxicants has been found so often to degen- 



Degraded Words. 59 

erate into their lawless and injurious abuse, we 
have come by degrees to conceive the incon- 
gruous notion of *' loving '* a favorite eatable, 
and our designation of the slightest possible 
use of wine has grown so swollen and distorted, 
like the persons of the depraved beings whose 
bad habits have brought about the change, as to 
imply the highest degree of riotous excess. 

The selfish and malevolent passions, too, have 
been at work upon our vocabulary. Charles 
Francis Adams, some years ago, took occasion 
to characterize the British nation as greatly 
^'addicted to commerce,'* for which expression 
he was censured by sundry newspapers, on the 
ground that commerce is not a vice. Truly it 
is not; but why should we never speak of per- 
sons or peoples as addicted (or profie^ or apt^ 
which are other expressions of exactly the same 
kind) to do anything but what is evil? — the 
words having equally proper application, both 
by etymology and by the authority of ancient 
usage, to good practices and to bad. Why, in- 
deed, had not common experience persistently 
given its testimony in support of something 
very like the much abused theological doctrine 



6o Our Common Speech. 

of total depravity, the doctrine that '* we are 
utterly indisposed to all good, and wholly 
inclined to all evil*'? 

Indolence^ again, once signified merely a 
condition of freedom from pain or excitement, 
and it would seem that its present parity with 
laziness must be due to the fact that humankind 
is not likely greatly to exert itself unless stimu- 
lated by the actual presence or the apprehended 
peril of some sort of discomfort. To be care- 
less, in Pope's time, was to be free from anxiety 
— not culpably negligent, as now. ** Thus 
wisely careless, innocently gay,'' he writes. In 
present common language, we seldom consider 
carelessness wise. Indifference was impartiality, 
so that it was once a compliment to say of a 
magistrate that he administered justice indiffer- 
ently, though we should now infer from the 
remark that his decisions were thoughtless and 
as likely to be wrong as right. 

To covet means, of course, properly speak- 
ing, only to desire eagerly, the French convoitery 
and the expression was formerly employed, as 
by the translators of the Bible in First Corin- 
thians (xii. 31), *' covet earnestly the best 



Degraded Words. 6i 

things *' — without that implication of evil which 
man's bad habit, his proneness to covet more 
particularly what he knows he ought not to 
have, has fastened upon it. 

The expression ** to inflame^' which we sel- 
dom hear now-a-days except in connection with 
some evil feeling, was used of old in reference to 
the good passions quite as freely as the bad, ex- 
amples of which practice can be found in many 
hymns still sung. "To de7tounce'' also, *' to 
instigate,''' " to conspire^' '' to abet,'' and '' to pro- 
voke," are verbs that we hardly ever employ at 
the present day except in reference to wrong 
doing, though just as correctly applicable to 
endeavors in the most praiseworthy directions, 
and once so used. An accomplice was not for 
merly by implication the assistant in an evil 
undertaking, as at present — see I. Henry VI, 
V. 2 : '' Success unto our valiant general, and 
happiness to his accomplices ! '' Animosity, 
in Sir Thomas Browne's '^ Urn Burial,'' 1658, 
meant courage, as where he tells us that Cato 
confirmed ** his wavering hand to animosity" by 
reading the Greek philosophers. To wrangle 
was formerly simply to argue, however politely 



62 Our Common Speech. 

— an ancient usage of which we still hear an 
echo in the honorary appointment of '' wran- 
glers '* at Cambridge University — though, as 
need hardly be said, a wrajtgle is now a noisy 
altercation, generally rather assertive than argu- 
mentative. So '' to have words'' with a man is 
now in most cases to quarrel with him, so great 
is the tendency of animated discussions, those 
in which we notice chiefly the great flow of 
words on both sides, to degenerate into heated 
disputes. 

But perhaps the most striking instance of the 
spoiling of words of this class is that which is 
furnished by the verbs retaliate^ resent, and their 
derivatives. The writer was once present at the 
parting of that scholarly but somewhat eccentric 
divine, the Rev. Dr. Samuel Hanson Cox, from 
a gentleman to whom he was indebted for hos- 
pitality, and to whom he said : *' You may be 
certain, sir, that I shall be glad of any opportu- 
nity to display my resentment of your atten- 
tions." The host looked rather blank, as well he 
might, and the doctor explained: *'That word 
resentment, sir, is a good word that has been 
brought into disgrace by man's wickedness. It 



Degraded Words. 6^ 

only indicates a feeling-back, a desire to recip- 
rocate, and was once employed as well in rela- 
tion to benefits as to injuries. But we have so 
short a memory for kindness, and so vague an 
intention of returning it, while our perceptions 
of wrong done us are so acute, and our inclina- 
tions toward revengeful purposes so strong, that 
one is actually not understood in these days if 
he speaks of resenting anything but an affront 
or an attack ! " This position is unquestionably 
sound ; and almost the same remarks apply also 
to the companion words retaliation and retaliate^ 
which certainly no one would think of employ- 
ing now except in connection with some kind of 
injury. Yet to retaliate is only to pay back, 
whether good or evil, as to resent is to feel back, 
whether with gratitude or with anger ; and ex- 
amples of the use of both words in the good 
sense abound in our earlier literature, particu- 
larly in the sermons of the seventeenth century, 
with whose authors they seem to have been 
favorite terms. Thus Isaac Barrow strongly 
enjoins the duty of cultivating '' resentment of 
our obligations to God," and in another passage 
remarks that '^ honor renders a man a faithful 



64 Our Common Speech. 

resenter of courtesies; " and Edmund Calamy 
says : *^ God takes what is done to others as 
done to himself, and by promise obliges himself 
to full retaliation/' Dryden, too, writing at 
about the same period, has the statement: *' The 
king expects a return from them, that the kind- 
ness which he has shown them may be retaliated 
on those of his own persuasion." Such expres- 
sions grate harshly on modern ears, but that 
is because the words have become soiled and 
polluted by the unworthy purposes to which 
they have now so long been generally restricted. 
And the language, let it be noticed, is just so 
much the poorer in consequence, for we have no 
exact synonyms with which, for their former 
and better use, we may replace them. 

V. 

Another unfortunate trait of character whose 
prevalence is curiously illustrated in a similar 
way, is that suggested by the adjectives meddle- 
some and officious. To meddle with anything 
was once merely to concern one's self with it, no 
implication of any impertinence or other impro- 



Degraded Words. 6^ 

priety being conveyed. Officious, in Bailey's 
time, had preserved exactly the meaning of its 
Latin ancestor, '* ready to do one a good office, 
serviceable, very obliging,*' and it is in this sense 
that Titus Andronicus uses it when he says [ v. 
2 ] : '^ Come, come, be every one officious to 
make this banquet." Pragmatical and busybody 
also, though perhaps always involving some 
degree of censure in their English use, ought 
certainly by every principle of etymology to be 
susceptible of an innocent if not a laudatory 
application. UpajfiaTtKo^; means ** active, able, 
business-like or prudent.'* A busybody is 
plainly a person who is busy ; and why, in either 
case, should it always be taken for granted that 
the individual of whom these terms are predi- 
cated is active about business that he might 
better let alone, unless the common experience 
of those who have employed the words has 
taught them that people are for the most part 
rather more likely to exert themselves in the 
pursuit of uncommendable enterprises than in 
the practice of their appropriate occupations? 



66 Our Common Speech. 



VI. 

Our evil tendency to grumble and complain 
of our surroundings, and to find fault with our 
fellow-men, has likewise been instrumental in 
the degradation of a number of common ex- 
pressions. Can it be believed, for instance, that 
homely would ever have come to mean ugly 
among people cultivating a due spirit of con- 
tentment with their daily lot? The adjectives 
chronic and inveteratCy also, and the nouns plight 
2in6. predicament^ ought to be as freely applicable 
to desirable states and conditions as to the re- 
verse. Dr. Cuyler once wrote, in the Evangelist : 
" We pastors set great store by chronic Chris- 
tians ; " but in present common usage it cannot 
be denied that these terms are seldom heard 
except in relation to things evil. A catastrophe^ 
too, is really only the final act of a drama, 
whether tragic or comic, and has perhaps become 
so nearly the synonym oi disaster chiefly because 
we are so apt to take it for granted, in our talk, 
if not in our real convictions, that things gener- 



Degraded Words. 67 

ally turn out badly. The same feeling is shown 
in our constant restriction of the use of the 
adjective ominous and the verbs to bode and to 
presage^ which words we never use except in 
connection with misfortunes. Etymologically, 
appearances might be ominous of joy, ox presage 
great success ; we might hdive forebodings of the 
most roseate hue as well as of the gloomiest. 

To censure was once merely to express an 
opinion, as in Richard III. : ''Will you go and 
give your censures in this business?'' To tra- 
duce was simply to blame, not to slander ; so 
Enobarbus speaks of Antony ( Antony and 
Cleopatra, iii. 7) as being '' traduced for levity." 
But our judgment of each other is so often 
uncharitably and undeservedly severe that the 
meanings of these words have become limited to 
unfavorable judgment and unfounded condemna- 
tion ; and it appears to me that animadvert and 
criticise are going the same way as censure \ we 
apply them much more frequently, I think, to 
the expression of blame than of commendation.^ 
The epithet egregious might formerly have 

1 See Atlantic Monthly, vol. 53, p. 578, April, 1884. 



68 Our Common Speech. 

been coupled with the name of the most dis- 
tinguished philosopher, poet or statesman; 
but we are so much readier at abusing our 
neighbors than praising them, that the term 
epithet has dropped almost entirely its good 
use; and we are so likely, in characterizing 
any person as at all peculiar, which is all that 
egregious really signifies, to mean that he is 
peculiarly disagreeable, that one rather expects 
now-a-days some highly damaging appellation 
to follow, when a man is mentioned as ** an 
egregious — " and there the speaker pauses. 
So with arrant, formerly the same as erranty 
and meaning merely wandering, but later used 
as synonymous with notorious, and since 1575 
(according to Dr. J. A. H. Murray) *' as an 
opprobrious intensive." 

VII. 

Man's propensity to over-reach his fellows 
when he can, and to take unfair advantage of 
their necessities, has branded several words 
with new opprobrium. To prevent is really 
only to get ahead of, or to precede, as in the 



Degraded Words. 69 

English Common Prayer : *^ Let thy grace always 
prevent and follow us;'' and Hamlet (ii. 2), '' So 
shall my anticipation prevent your discovery/' 
But alas ! those who reach first a desirable goal 
are so wont to take advantage of their position, 
not to help others get there too, but to block 
the way if possible, that the verb which ought 
only to describe the arrival of the first-comers 
in advance of the rest, is now understood as 
implying also their doing the best they can to 
monopoHze the good fortune, and prevent 
others from sharing it. 

Another illustration of the same principle, 
still stronger perhaps, is furnished by the word 
rival. Rivals were at first only the occupiers 
of the banks of the same stream, and a little 
later, partners or co-laborers in the same en- 
terprise. It is in this sense that Bernardo 
speaks of Horatio and Marcellus as the rivals 
of his watch. But it came to be perceived 
that joint owners and partners are very apt to 
quarrel, each doing his best to possess him- 
self of all the advantages of the combination, 
until at last the word, in our present usage, 
has come to involve the entirely modern addi- 



c 



70 Our Common Speech. 

tion of a conflict of interest, and more or less 
hard-feeling between the parties. 

Artful y so late as the time of Johnson, meant 
only skillful, not tricky. Usury was once merely 
interest money, however moderate the amount 
and however legal and equitable the charge. 
A cheats or escheatour, was a royal officer in 
England who attended to the sequestration of 
estates that were forfeited to the crown, and 
the corrupt practices of these men led it to be 
commonly believed that to ''cheat'' a man was 
to deprive him of his property unfairly — 
which meaning is now the only one recognized. 
To embezzle was to spend rashly and foolishly, 
but it was applied for a long time to the man's 
own property — ''Mr. Hackluit died, leaving 
a fair estate to an unthrift son, who embezzled 
it " ^ — that is, wasted it — until it was dis- 
covered that spendthrifts are apt to become 
thieves as well. A defalcation was formerly 
only a diminution or abatement, as in Burke : 
"The natural method in reformation would be 
to take the estimates and show what may be 
safely defalcated from them." Its present use, 

1 Thomas Fuller, " Worthies of Englandy'' 1662. 



Degraded Words. 71 

as implying knavery in the diminution, is possi- 
bly due in part to some supposed connection 
with " default '' and ** defaulter/' to which words 
it is by etymology only very distantly if at all 
related. 

VIII. 
Of the great multitude of other degraded 
words that do not so readily fall into classes, 
but illustrate nevertheless each one the prev- 
alence of some blameworthy course of action 
or thought, may be instanced gossip, which de- 
noted first a fellow sponsor in baptism, next an 
intimate friend, and finally a too-talkative and 
therefore often dangerous companion; voluble^ 
which was only fluent (and not unduly fluent as 
at present) when Bishop Hacket, a little more 
than two hundred years ago, wrote of Arch- 
bishop Abbott that ** he was of a grave and 
voluble eloquence ;'* ^^;^^^^V, properly the equi- 
valent of idea or opinion, but rarely used now 
except for such opinions as the speaker deems 
ill-founded or absurd ; profane, which originally 
meant only secular or non-sacred, as we still 
say *' profane history," and its opposite, fanatic, 
which really signifies about the same as inspired; 



72 Our Common Speech. 

libertine and miscreant, formerly synonymous 
with free-thinker and infidel, and having refer- 
ence solely to the man's opinions instead of 
his actions; obsequious ^ which originally im- 
plied merely the exercise of affectionate and 
becoming obedience ; fussy ^ which was once the 
same as busy ; an apology ^ which was of old 
only a defence, by no means implying that the 
thing apologized for was in the slightest degree 
admitted to be improper, but merely that it had 
been attacked ; ringleader and notorious, which 
have only in modern times become restricted to 
their present evil sense ; bush- whacking, which 
was originally ** a harmless word, denoting sim- 
ply the process of propelling a boat by pulling 
the bushes, or of beating them down in order 
to open a way through a thicket;"^ ?i froser, 
which term really indicates only a person who 
writes prose, whether tiresome or the reverse ; 
casuistry, the science of determining what is 
duty, but more generally applied to specious 
attempts at making the worse appear the better 
reason; emissary, a messenger, but almost 
always now a messenger of evil purposes ; 

A Scheie de Vere, " Americanisms," p. 89. 



Degraded Words. 73 

demagogue^ a leader of the people — Dean Swift 
calls Demosthenes and Cicero demagogues, 
intending to do them honor ; silly y which was 
originally synonymous with harmless or inno- 
cent ; willfuly which should mean not much more 
than determined^ though in practice we never 
hear of the willful performance of anything but 
evil ; andaciotiSy now understood to mean impu- 
dent ^ but formerly the same as brave ; beldame ^ 
originally a grandmother; abo7ni7iable, which 
once meant only excessive or monstrous ; bare^ 
facedy which for a long time signified undis- 
guised^ and only more recently, shameless ; rife^ 
which I think we seldom employ now except in 
connection with something unpleasant; virago y 
which Johnson defines, first, as *' a female war- 
rior/' quoting from Peacham — '* Melpomene 
is represented like a virago or manly lady, 
with a majestic and grave countenance;" the 
adjective jesuiticaly and the verb to jew^ which 
are invariably used in a highly offensive sense 
not at all implied by their etymology. 



74 Our Common Speech. 



IX. 

Not to prolong, however, this catalogue of 
human frailties, there is one bad habit that 
gives constant annoyance in our daily life, and 
seems sometimes to prepare the way for all 
the others — the habit of procrastination, un- 
necessary and vexatious delay when action is 
demanded. A vice so common could hardly 
fail to make its impression on the language. 
Accordingly we find that certain adverbs of 
time which are and have been very frequently 
employed in promising immediate attention to 
duty, have lost by degrees a large share of 
their former intensity (promises of this kind 
being so often broken), and have become so 
weakened and enervated as quite to obscure 
the sense in many passages of the older writers. 
Thus Bailey's definition of the v^oxd. presently — 
which is *' at present, at this time, now," as 
exemplified by Cardinal Beaufort in King 
Henry Sixth [part two, i, i], *' this weighty 
business will not brook delay; I'll to the Duke 
of Suffolk presently" — this definition is marked 



Degraded Words. 75 

"obsolete'' by Webster, though that meaning 
still seems to survive in Great Britain, for such 
expressions as *' Gen. Ramsay is presently 
visiting at the castle " are not uncommon in 
British papers. Yet the American lexicog- 
rapher is indisputably correct when he pro- 
ceeds to mention, as the synonyms of this 
adverb in its more common applications, the 
words *' soon, before long, after a little time'' — 
which embody quite a different conception. 

As regards the similar term by-and-by^ the 
case is if possible still stronger, the ancient 
meaning still more debilitated in modern usage. 
Of course this word in our present understand- 
ing of it, invariably implies considerable delay, 
but we need only turn to the Greek Testament 
to discover that King James' translators con- 
sidered it the equivalent for the most em- 
phatic adverbs that the original tongue can 
furnish to indicate instant and hurried action — 
eu^u?, eu^eo)? and k^avTrf, These words mean 
suddenly, hastily, rashly, at the very point of 
time; and are rendered ** straightway," '* im- 
mediately " and '' forthwith " in the Bible itself, 
when by-and-by is not used. In the account 



76 Our Common Speech. 

given by Ulysses in the Ajax of his breathless 
and frantic pursuit of the mad warrior who had 
butchered the flocks and their guardians, Sopho- 
cles makes him say : ^' And to me a watch- 
man that espied him bounding over the plains 
alone, with freshly reeking sword, tells it ; and 
evOeco^ [that is, instafitly\ I hurry close on his 
steps." Fancy rendering this, as is done with 
the same word in the Bible, ^^ By-and-by I hurry 
on his steps ! " How completely such a trans- 
lation destroys the coherence of the narrative ! 
What a flood of light is thrown too upon the 
real intent of the sacred writers, when we sub- 
stitute (as is done in the Revised Version) the 
stronger and now more accurate expressions 
for the indefinite by-and-by^ as in Matthew xiii. 
21 : ** Yet hath he not root in himself, for when 
tribulation or persecution ariseth because of the 
word," not " by-and-by^' but STRAIGHTWAY '' he 
is offended," does not hold out at all — makes 
no effort for a single moment to breast the cur- 
rent! Again, Mark vi. 25: *' And she came 
in straightway with haste unto the king, and 
asked, saying, I will that thou give me," not 
'' by-and-byy' but forthwith, " in a charger, 



Degraded Words. 77 

the head of John the Baptist." Finally, Luke 
xxi. 9 : ^' But when ye shall hear of wars and 
commotions, be not terrified, for these things 
must first come to pass, but the end is not'' — 
IMMEDIATELY. And if the gradual fading out 
of the original intense emphasis of these words 
is largely due, as every consideration seems 
to render probable, to the fact that people have 
so often said they would do things ** presently '* 
or ** by-and-by," and then have neglected them, 
so that in process of time the idea of more or 
less delay has become thoroughly involved in 
the common understanding of the words them- 
selves — what a commentary does it furnish 
upon the prevalence of this habit of procrasti- 
nation, that these terms, once the strongest that 
could be found to picture hurried and impatient 
action, have come at last, as indisputably in 
ordinary usage they have, to denote so vaguely 
an indefinite period, at an indefinite distance, 
in the indefinite and uncertain future ! 



THE ENGLISH OF THE REVISED NEW 
TESTAMENT. 

The truth is, — as all who have given real thought to 
the subject must be aware, — the phenomena of language 
are among the most subtle and delicate imaginable : the 
problem of translation, one of the most many-sided and 
difficult that can be named. And if this holds universally, 
in how much greater a degree when the book to be trans- 
lated is the Bible ! . . . Not the least service which the 
revisionists have rendered has been the proof their work 
affords, how very seldom our authorized version is 
materially wrong. ... It is but fair to add that their 
work bears marks of an amount of conscientious labor 
which those only can fully appreciate who have made 
the same province of study to some extent their own. — 
London Quarterly Review, 

TT is to be feared that the revisers of the New 
^ Testament, looking back novv^ after the lapse 
of a dozen years and more since the version of 
1 88 1 was issued, can hardly feel that the public 
appreciation of their efforts has been quite what 
was expected. No important church has for- 
mally approved the revised version; no great 
Bible society has undertaken to circulate it; 



English of Revised New Testament. 79 

and while the most competent authorities appear 
to be pretty nearly unanimous in commending 
alike the Greek readings adopted by the revis- 
ers in disputed passages, and the fidelity with 
which the original is, on the whole, represented 
by their rendering, it nevertheless cannot be 
denied that so far as the English of the book 
is concerned, a large part of the criticism which 
has appeared — bursting forth in (somewhat 
discordant) chorus immediately after the publi- 
cation of the work, and continuing at intervals 
ever since — has been of an unfavorable tone, 
and that this judgment operates powerfully in 
perpetuating the supremacy of the King James 
translation. It cannot be denied, either, that 
the impartial reader who takes pains to examine 
the matter without prejudice either in favor of 
or against alterations qua alterations, will find 
what really seem to be an unreasonably large 
number of verbal blemishes marring the great 
work. The following may be mentioned as 
instances of rather gross infelicities which should 
certainly have been avoided : 

I. ** Repented himself,'' whatever it may for- 
merly have been, is surely not good English now. 



8o Our Common Speech. 

Yet not only is the archaic phrase retained in 
Matt, xxvii. 3 ; but in Matt. xxi. 29, 32, and 
Heb. vii. 21, the modern English of the author- 
ized version is replaced by the utterly obsolete 
construction, making repent a reflexive verb. 

2. In John xix. 29 we now read that *' they 
put a sponge full of vinegar upon hyssop, and 
brought it to his mouth." The authorized ver- 
sion has ** put." The verb *' bring " indicates 
almost invariably, except in the mouths of 
the careless or ignorant, a motion toward the 
speaker ; and it is not easy to conjecture by 
what possible argument its employment in the 
sentence quoted can be regarded as defensible. 

3. In 1st Cor. i. 18, we have: *^ Unto us which 
are being sdivcd'' \ in 2d Cor. ii. 15, ^^ In them 
that are being saved " ; in Col. iii. 10; *' The new 
man, which is being renewed unto knowledge " ; 
and in 2d Tim. iv. 6, *^ For / am already being 
offered." Much may of course be said — much 
has been said — in justification of this construc- 
tion; but it will be admitted on all sides that 
the best practice very seldom employs it. 

4. In Matt. V. 35, Heb. i. 13 and x. 13 occur 
the cumbrous and cacophonous phrases, ** The 



English of Revised New Testament. 8i 

footstool of thy feet/' ** The footstool of his 
feet," and in ist Peter iii. 17, *' If the will of 
God should so will." What possible purpose, 
in an English book, is served by these awkward 
repetitions? And is not the last an absurdity 
at best, as we use the words in Ertglish ? God 
can will; and his will can be this or that; but 
can his will will? The fact that these phrases 
exactly represent the Greek, is no sufficient rea- 
son, surely, for inflicting them on the English 
reader, the genius and structure of the two lan- 
guages being so different. Almost as well might 
the Greek double negative be rendered by two 
** nots " in one English negative sentence. 

5. Not exactly bad English, perhaps, but cer- 
tainly not good English at the present day, is 
the old rendering of *^ single " for dirXov^ in 
Matt. vi. 22 and Luke xi. 34, which is retained 
by the revisers. This translation (though of 
course in a certain sense undeniably accurate) 
is particularly objectionable, as tending to mis- 
lead the reader. We often hear of an ** eye 
single to the public good," meaning an eye 
turned exclusively in that one direction; and 
the sense of the passages as we have them in 

6 



82 Our Common Speech. 

English appears to be that if the mind is steadily- 
devoted to one purpose all will be well, which is 
very different from their real significance. 

6. Why is bits^ in James iii. 3, changed to 
bridles ? Does any one ever think of saying, 
in ordinary speech, that he puts a ** bridle " 
into a horse's mouth? The poor animal would 
find his mouth very uncomfortably distended, 
were such an operation undertaken ; and might 
well apprehend dislocation of the jaws if it were 
successfully carried out. 

7. It is to be regretted that we still read 
** Simon Bar-Jonah" in Matt. xvi. 17, while in 
John xxi. 15, 16, 17, it is '' Simon, son of John.*' 
Of course the '*/3a/)*' is found in the Greek 
text in the first case, and not in the others ; but 
the meaning is identical, the Twm is identical. 
Why should " he that occupieth the room of the 
unlearned '' be caused to stumble by finding 
** Bar-Jonah '' in one place, and '* son of John '' 
elsewhere, while the evangelists intended to 
write precisely the same thing? 

It is not only in single phrases, however, that 
the revisers made bad work. There are whole 
classes of words that they handle unskillfully, — 



English of Revised New Testament. 83 

such as the pronouns thy and thine, who and 
which and that^ which they seem to exchange 
quite at random; the subjunctive moods of 
verbs; the adverbs ahvay and always ; the con- 
junction andy which they use much too freely 
for the best English practice ; and the particles 
ify though^ whether^ tmless and except^ which 
they employ rather carelessly and inaccurately. 
On these points it is hardly needful now to en- 
large, for they have been discussed at length in 
a book called *^ The Revisers' English," by Mr. 
G. Washington Moon, a gentleman who had 
previously done good service in pointing out a 
number of Dean Alford's errors. This book is 
worth reading. Mr. Moon always writes enter- 
tainingly, on grammatical subjects at least, and 
generally teaches sound doctrine, though read- 
ers are likely to be somewhat prejudiced against 
his conclusions by his unfortunate manner of 
stating them, for he is afflicted with so irascible 
a temper that he can seldom content himself with 
attacking what he regards as bad practice with- 
out at the same time reviling every critic that 
disagrees with him. He is moreover a little too 
much tied down to certain hard-and-fast inter- 



84 Our Common Speech. 

pretations of general laws to which the best 
usage recognizes, and always will recognize, 
and always ought to recognize, a number of 
seeming — perhaps not real — exceptions. 

Of one exemplification of the last-named 
defect in Mr. Moon's grammatical teaching, 
illustrations may be found abundantly in his 
criticisms of the revisers' English, and the 
matter is worth considering — not, of course, 
that it is highly important whether Mr. Moon is 
right or wrong about it, but because he opens a 
question on which it is indispensably necessary 
that clear and sound views should be held by 
all who would use our language correctly and 
forcibly. I refer to his abnormal development, 
so to speak, of the rule that a verb must agree 
in number with its subject. This rule he thinks 
is repeatedly violated by the revisers, and he 
abuses and ridicules them without stint for so 
doing. He specifies the following instances : 

1 . " Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon the 
earth, where moth and rust doth consume.'* — Matt, 
vi. 19. 

2. "Out of the same mouth cometh forth blessing 
and cursing." — James Hi. 10. 



English of Revised New Testament. 85 

As to these utterly and inexcusably ungram- 
matical sentences, of course there can be no 
difference of opinion. A ten-year-old boy ought 
to be ashamed of them ; and their appearance 
in a work prepared by scholars of such standing 
as those who constituted the company of revis- 
ers, furnishes a striking illustration of the degree 
to which the study of our own language is 
neglected in both British and American insti- 
tutions of learning. It is most lamentable that 
such sentences could go through the press with- 
out correction. If all Mr. Moon's illustrations of 
the error referred to were of this character, one 
could readily forgive him for almost any display 
of irritation on discovering them. But let us 
see. He offers further specifications as below : 

3. " His face was as the sun, and his feet as pillars 
of fire." — Rev, x, i. 

4. " His feet were as the feet of a bear, and his 
mouth as the mouth of a lion." — Rev, xiii. 2. 

5. "Who is my mother and my brethren?" — 
Mark iii, 33. 

6. " Is not his mother called Mary? and his breth- 
ren, James, and Joseph, and Simon, and Judas?" — 
Matt, xiii. 55. 



86 Our Common Speech. 

These sentences are incomplete, certainly; 
but it may be questioned whether they are 
necessarily equivalent, as Mr. Moon believes, 
to writing, in No. 3, '*His feet was as pillars of 
fire,'' in No. 4, ^* His mouth were as the mouth 
of a lion," in No. 5, '^ Who is my brethren ? '' 
and in No. 6, ** Is not his brethren ? '' It seems 
to me that the ellipsis is more naturally filled 
in, by the mind of the reader, with the verb in 
each case in its proper number. 

And here is a still more doubtful case : 

7. "To whom God was pleased to make known 
what is the riches of the glory of this mystery among 
the Gentiles, which is Christ in you, the hope of 
glory." — Col. /. 27. 

Mr. Moon is of opinion that the ** is '* in the 
last clause refers to *^ richeSy' and should there- 
fore be '' areT It does not seem to me that 
the supposed reference is certainly what was 
intended ; and even if it is, I think that the 
clause may be regarded as transposed, the sub- 
ject of the verb being Christ, exactly as in the 
sentences ** The wages of sin is death '' {Rom. vi. 
23) and '' The seal of mine apostleship are ye ** 



English of Revised New Testament. 87 

(i Cor, ix, 2) — the verb in each case pre- 
ceding its subject. Possibly it would have been 
better to render the original ttXovto^ by some 
English word which resembles it in being used 
in the singular number, ''opulence^' perhaps, or 
** wealthr The matter, at all events, may safely 
be passed as of rather minor consequence, the 
error, if error there is, being far from flagrant. 

The sentences really important for discus- 
sion, in view of Mr. Moon's criticism, are the 
following : 

8. "Among whom also was Dionysius the Areo- 
pagite, and a woman named Damaris, and others with 
them." — Acts xvii, 34. 

9. "Among whom was Mary Magdalene, and Mary 
the mother of James and Joses, and the mother of the 
sons of Zebedee." — Matt, xxvii. 56. 

10. "Of whom is Hymenaeus and Alexander.** — 
I St Ti7n, i, 20. 

II." Wherein was a golden pot holding the manna, 
and Aaron's rod that budded, and the tables of the 
covenant." — Heb, ix, 4. 

12. "And now abideth faith, hope, love, these 
three." — i Cor, xiii, 13. 

13. "Where jealousy and faction are, there is con- 
fusion and every vile deed." — James Hi, 16. 



88 Our Common Speech. 

14. "' Here is the patience and the faith of the 
saints.'* — Rev, xiii, 10. 

15. *^ On these two commandments hangeth the 
whole law, and the prophets." —J/^//. xxii, 40. 

16. ^^ Whose is the adoption, and the glory, and 
the covenants, and the giving of the law, and the 
service of God, and the promises." - — Rom, ix, 4. 

17. ''That ye may be strong to apprehend with 
all the saints what is the breadth and length and 
height and depth, and to know the love of Christ."- — 
Eph, Hi. 18. 

All the above are condemned by Mr. Moon 
as grossly incorrect ; the verb, he thinks, should 
be plural in every case. It appears to me that 
the criticism is ill founded. A plural verb would 
have been correct, assuredly; but it does not 
necessarily follow that a verb in the singular 
must be wrong ; and I think that insistence on 
the plural in such cases would often have the 
effect of altering — slightly, to be sure, but per- 
ceptibly — the shade of meaning intended when 
(as in at least some of the cases before us) the 
several subjects of the verb are thought of, not 
as united in a single conception, but as separate 
and distinct items. Substantially this explana- 



English of Revised New Testament. 89 

tion of the revisers' language was suggested to 
Mr. Moon by one of his reviewers, who said 
that ** the second substantive is added as a kind 
of afterthought '' — a suggestion which nearly 
threw the critic into a fit. ** An aftertho2ight of 
the Holy Spirit ? " he cries, in shrill hysterics ; 
** this is dreadful ! What does Dr. Sanday mean? " 
Well, in view of the statements in i Cor. i. 14, 
15, 16,^ the supposition of an afterthought in 
Scripture seems neither absurd nor blasphemous ; 
but waiving that point, it must still be clear to 
persons not quite so excitable as Mr. Moon 
that, whatever view one takes of the inspiration 
of the Bible, an inspired writer is just as much 
bound by the limitations of language as is any 
other, and just as much at liberty, moreover, to 
employ figures of rhetoric. A complete idea 
cannot always be presented in a single word, 
sometimes not in a single symmetrical phrase ; 
and a very effective way of making certain classes 
of statements is to appear to overlook some 
items at first, mentioning them subsequently 

1 " I thank God that I baptized none of you, save Crispus 
and Gains ; lest any man should say that ye were baptized 
into my name. And I baptized also the household of Ste- 
phanas : besides, I know not whether I baptized any other." 



go Our Common Speech. 

one by one as if they had just occurred to the 
writer as desirable additions or corrections. I 
think it is in this way, simply and naturally 
enough, that the ordinary reader will under- 
stand the sentences quoted. That is, the effect 
made on his mind by No. 8 is as if it read: 
*^ Among whom was Dionysius the Areopagite, 
and [also] a woman named Damaris, and others 
[were] with them.'' So in No. 12: ''And now 
abideth faith ; [and] hope [abideth] ; [and] love 
[abideth] ; these three [abide]." Again, in 
No. 15 : *' On these two commandments hangeth 
the whole law — [yes] and [so do] the prophets 
[as well]." 

In the doxology of the Lord's Prayer — sup- 
pressed in the revised version, but mentioned 
by Mr. Moon as a parallel case of incorrect syn- 
tax — I think not only that the translators were 
justified in following the Greek original by using 
the verb in the singular, but that the plural 
would have been positively wrong, as suggesting 
a connection of thought that was not intended 
and will not bear analysis. We ask for the 
blessings solicited ''for" (or because) God's is 
the kingdom, and the power — the sovereignty 



English of Revised New Testament, 91 

over even the evil in the universe, and he is able 
therefore to grant us whatever is good and pro- 
tect us from whatever is bad. But there is no 
logic in asking God for help and deliverance 
because his is the glory ; and this is just what 
we should do if we said: '^Deliver us from 
evil, for thine are the kingdom and the power 
and the glory/* This construction would im- 
ply that all the subjects of the verb are in 
the speaker's mind when he begins the clause, 
and make him say, in effect: ^* Grant us these 
blessings, because thine is the glory.'* As it 
is, the conclusion seems, to me at least, per- 
fectly clear and reasonable : ^^ Deliver us from 
evil, for thine is the kingdom [even over the 
evil], and the power [to save us is thine] ; and 
the glory [is and shall be thine] forever/' The 
object of using language, after all, is to express 
thought ; and while no clear violation of a rule 
of syntax is to be condoned on the ground that 
it does not obscure the meaning, yet if the mean- 
ing is clear, and the supposed violation is so 
readily explained away in the reader's mind, 
there is hardly occasion — to say the least — 
for extremely severe criticism. 



92 Our Common Speech. 

One rather curious blunder into which it is 
surprising that the revisers fell is repeated by 
Mr. Moon. They say in their preface (Art. iii. 
§ 2, If 8) : ^' Sometimes the change has been made 
to avoid tautology '' — oblivious (or ignorant) of 
the manifest fact that there cannot be tautology 
in an accurate translation if it does not exist in 
the original. Tautology is the needless repeti- 
tion of an identical idea in different words ; it 
proceeds from confused thinking, and can 
neither be aggravated nor ameliorated by chang- 
ing the phraseology, having indeed nothing to 
do with any question of the use of language, 
strictly speaking. The revisers* error on this 
point is adopted by their critic, who speaks of 
" verbal repetitions " as equivalent to tautology, 
and instances these sentences : " From him that 
hath not, even that which he hath shall be taken 
away from him *' (^Lttke xix. 26), and : ^^ Cast out 
first the beam out of thine own eye; and then 
shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of 
thy brother's eye " {Matt, viz, 5). These phrases 
are unpleasant, certainly ; but they are 7iot tauto- 
logical; they have nothing to do with tautology ; 
and it is tolerably certain, notwithstanding the 



English of Revised New Testament. 93 

revisers* fear and Mr. Moon's supposed discovery 
that these fears were justified by the issue, that 
no case of real tautology exists in any reason- 
ably accurate translation of the New Testament. 
Were the contrary the case, the responsibility 
would assuredly lie further back than with the 
translators. 

It ought to be said, in general conclusion, 
that the revised version is entitled to a good 
deal of charity, when judged simply as an 
English book. The peculiar difficulties under 
which the revisers labored must have been 
perplexing and formidable. Their task was not 
to make a new translation, but merely to improve 
the old. To take an English classic — any 
English classic — of the beginning of the seven- 
teenth century, and alter its language now, 
without thoroughly recasting the whole thing 
into the speech of our own day, and without 
producing the effect of a patch of new cloth 
here and there on the old garment, is a task 
from which the most skillful user of our lan- 
guage might well shrink. That the revisers of 
1 88 1 secured even a measurable degree of 
success in an undertaking at once so arduous 



94 O^^ Common Speech. 

and so delicate, is in a high degree creditable 
to their abilities and their judgment; and the 
English-speaking public has good reason to 
felicitate itself that the final result came any- 
where near meeting with general approval. It 
is not entirely satisfactory; but one might well 
have expected something so much worse ! 



OLD ENGLISH DICTIONARIES. 

A dictionary is not bad reading on the whole. It is 
much more endurable than a good many of what are 
called lighter books, and not much more unconnected. 
... In the hands of a patient reader it would form 
almost a course of study in itself, and very far from a dry 
one; he would make acquaintance in its pages with a 
good many English authors to whom no one else is very 
likely to introduce him; and though this acquaintance 
would certainly, in one sense, be very superficial, it would 
not in that respect differ from popular knowledge in gen- 
eral, and would at least have the advantage of being 
accurate and critical, so far as it went, in point of style. 
— Blackwood's Magazine, 

nPHE history of English lexicography is long 
^ and brilliant; it could hardly have been 
otherwise. The complex and constantly va- 
rying structure of our language, perpetually 
inviting, and perpetually defying, systematic 
arrangement ; and the circumstances of the 
people who have used it, scattered as they have 
been over the whole face of the globe and yet 
maintaining continued intercourse and corre- 



gS Our Common Speech. 

spondence with each other to an extent en- 
tirely unparalleled in history, have created a 
demand for vocabularies of English very much 
more imperative than has existed for those of 
any other tongue. Demand creates supply, 
and for nearly three centuries a new English 
dictionary has appeared about as often as the 
leap-year has come round; that is, during the 
last 290 years some seventy such works have 
been published, not counting revised editions 
except when radically remodeled or greatly 
enlarged. Many of these books, of course, 
are of small importance, but many others are 
not only practically very useful, but remark- 
able, besides, either as monuments of the dili- 
gence and the learning of their individual 
authors or as showing what marvels can be ac- 
complished by the co-operation of a number 
of literary workmen. 

The period of 290 years is mentioned as 
covering the history of English lexicography, 
because the first book which can properly be 
called an English dictionary was published in 
1604. Lexicographical work had, however, 
been done in England, and partly in the Ian- 



Old English Dictionaries* 97 

guage of England, nearly a thousand years 
before ; and even a succinct sketch of the de- 
velopment of the science should notice, at least 
as a preliminary stage, the great number of 
vocabularies, partly in English and partly in 
other tongues, that were welcomed by the lite- 
rary public from the writing, in the seventh cen- 
tury, of the work on which the Epinal Glossary 
was founded, down to Cotgrave's Dictionarie of 
the French and English Tongues, dated 161 1. 
Twenty-five or thirty such works are known to 
have been printed, while a much larger number 
remained as manuscripts only, a great majority 
having been prepared before the invention of 
movable types. The earliest of these compila- 
tions were mere ** glosses '' — lists of unfamiliar 
terms in particular books, or certain selections 
of unfamiliar terms — with interpretations. One 
of them, the famous Epinal Glossary, of which 
mention has just been made, is especially inter- 
esting, as being the very oldest document known 
to be now in existence in which the English lan- 
guage is employed. It is a vocabulary of unu- 
'sual or peculiar Latin (and a few Greek) words, 
the equivalents of which are given sometimes in 

7 



98 Our Common Speech. 

easier Latin, and sometimes in the English of 
those days — not always the Enghsh of ours. 
It consists of 28 pages of parchment, some of 
them badly soiled, but nowhere quite illegible. 
On each page are six columns, of which the 
first, third and fifth contain, in an approxi- 
mation to alphabetical order, the Latin words 
to be explained, the interpretations being placed 
at the right and forming columns two, four 
and six. Phrases occasionally occur, but com- 
monly the author contented himself with ren- 
dering in each case a single word by a single 
word. The 84 explanatory columns contain 
about 3200 entries, of w^hich perhaps a thousand 
can be called English, though barely a score of 
these would be understood by persons familiar 
only with the language as now spoken. It may 
be worth w^hile to enumerate these twenty, they 
being, as has been mentioned, instances of the 
occurrence of terms now in familiar use, in the 
oldest document we have in which any English is 
to be found, a document written nearly twelve 
hundred years ago. It will be noticed that only 
two of the twenty have as many as two syllables, 
and one of these is a compound. The vener- 



Old English Dictionaries. 99 

able words referred to are : GarleCy dil^ dross ^ 
gooSy beer (bier, a litter, not the drink), malt^ 
kaniy bedd, broom (the plant), frost, men, hand- 
ful, stonUy spilth, disc, fleah, flint, stream, tin, 
elm. 

I. 

What may be called the first era of purely- 
English lexicography covered practically the 
seventeenth century. All the dictionaries of 
our language produced during this period were 
on the gloss plan, confining themselves to words 
supposed to be not generally understood. Their 
authors are nine in number — Cawdrey, Bul- 
lokar, Cockeram, Blount, Phillips, Coles, Cocker, 
one anonymous, and Kersey. 

Robert Cawdrey, the first of all, began the 
great work by issuing a small book with a large 
title : '* A Table Alphabeticall, conteyning and 
teaching the true writing, and understanding of 
hard usual English wordes, borrowed from the 
Hebrew, Greeke, Latine, or French, &c., with 
the interpretation thereof by plaine English 
words, gathered for the benefit & helpe of ladies, 
gentlewomen, or any other unskilful! persons, 



lOO Our Common Speech. 

whereby they may the more easiHe and better 
understand many hard English wordes, which 
they shall heare or read in scriptures, sermons, 
or elsewhere, and also be made able to use the 
same aptly themselves. Legere^ et non intelli- 
gere^ neglegere est — as good not read, as not 
to understand. At London, printed by I. R. for 
Edmund Weaver, & are to be sold at his shop at 
the great north doore of Paules Church: 1604.'' 
It will be seen that the author's name does 
not appear on the title-page, but it is signed to 
a letter of dedication that follows. The persons 
that he had chiefly in mind must have been 
''unskilfull" indeed, for he judges it needful to 
add this caution: *' If thou be desirous (gentle 
reader) rightly and readily to understand, and 
profit by this table, and such like, then thou 
must learn the alphabet, to wit, the order of the 
letters as they stand, perfectly without book, 
and where every letter standeth : as {¥) neere the 
beginning, {n) about the middest, and (/) 
toward the end." 

Twelve years after the appearance of Caw- 
drey's ** Table,'* namely in 1616, Dr. John 
Bullokar issued his ^* English Expositour, or 



Old English Dictionaries. loi 

Compleat Dictionary, teaching the interpreta- 
tion of the hardest words, and most useful 
terms of art used in our language," and said 
to contain 5080 entries. A copy of the sixth 
edition of this work, dated 1680, may be seen 
at the New York State Library in the capi- 
tol at Albany — a 24mo of about 290 pages. 
One definition, not badly expressed for the 
time, caught my eye in looking it over. This is 
that of the term heretick^ which Dr. Bullokar 
explains thus : *' He that maketh his own choice, 
what points of religion he will believe, and what 
he will not believe." The author was no friend 
to vain repetitions, and when he has dealt with, 
for instance, an adjective, he generally leaves it 
to the common-sense of the reader to divine for 
himself the meanings of the allied noun and verb. 
** If," he remarks, '* the adjective crude signifies 
rawy the substantive crudity must signify raw- 
ness, and so contrarily." Perhaps he carried his 
rule too far, but the main principle seems to 
have reason, and if it had been adopted at least 
in part by modern dictionary makers — to the 
exclusion of such utterly superfluous entries 
as ^^ bottle-ale'' in Webster, ^^ madwoman'' in 



I02 Our Common Speech. 

Worcester and '' codliver oW in the Century, the 
dictionary-using public would have had cause 
for gratitude. But the most characteristic fea- 
ture of Bullokar's book, and one hardly to be 
commended, is an index ** wherein the vulgar 
[or common] words are prefixed in an alpha- 
betical order before the others [that is, the 
grander words of foreign derivation] as a ready 
direction for the finding them out," assisting 
writers to turn their plain, succinct English into 
high-flown and almost always longer terms, to 
the manifest injury of their style. The work 
has also a sort of brief cyclopaedia, '' containing 
a summary of the most memorable things and 
famous persons." The last paragraph of the 
doctor's preface is worth copying: 

"Those virtuous and well addicted persons, who, 
rather for want of opportunity than generous inclin- 
ation, not having had the fortune to attain to the 
knowledge of any other than the mother language, 
are yet studiously desirous to read those learned and 
eloquent treatises which from their native original 
have been rendered English (of which sort, thanks 
to the company of painful translators, we have not 
a few), have here a volume fit for their purpose, as 



Old English Dictionaries. 103 

carefully designed for their assistance ; and to such, 
and only such, we recommend it, and that with this 
benediction, live long, industrious reader, advance in 
knowledge and be happy." 

Seven years after Bullokar, 1623, appeared 
" The English Dictionary, or an Interpreter of 
Hard English Words,'* by H[enry] C[ockeram], 
Gent. This writer is best remembered for his 
exhortation to the '* gentle reader '* to '' have a 
care to search every word according to the true 
orthography thereof; as for Physiognomie in 
the letter Py not in Fy for cynicall in Cy^ not Ci^ 
His horror of what he calls '' vulgar '' words is 
also a distinguishing feature. Thus he con- 
demns the adjective rude and tells us to say 
*' agresticall ; '' also the verb to weedCy for which 
he would substitute the pleasing terms to ^^ sar- 
dilate y' to '^ diritncinatey' or to *' averuncate*^ 
The work ran to at least nine editions. 

At about the middle of the century under 
review, namely, in 1656, appeared Thomas 
Blount's *' Glossographia, or a dictionary inter- 
preting the hard words of whatsoever language 
now used in our refined English tongue; with 
etymologies, definitions and historical observa- 



I04 Our Common Speech. 

tions on the same." It is largely composed of 
foreign and technical words, but includes histor- 
ical and geographical names also, as well as 
many words now at least (possibly not then) of 
daily use. One is stepmother^ so-called, Blount 
thought, '^because she' steps in instead of a 
mother by marrying the son or daughter's 
father; a mother-in-law/* The work *'is chiefly 
intended,'* says a note to the reader in the edi- 
tion of 1670, ** for the more-knowing women, 
and less-knowing men ; or indeed for all such of 
the unlearned, who can but find in an alphabet 
the word they understand not; yet I think I 
may modestly say the best of scholars may in 
some part or other be obliged by it/* A fifth 
edition, considerably enlarged, appeared in 1681, 
making a duodecimo of 710 pages, which are 
duly numbered on the present plan. 

In 1658, Edward Phillips (nephew of John 
Milton) issued the first edition of his ** New 
World of Words, or a Universal English Dic- 
tionary, containing the proper significations and 
derivations of all words from other languages 
* * * as now made use of in our English tongue, 
together with the definitions of all those terms 



Old English Dictionaries. 105 

that conduce to the understanding of any of the 
arts or sciences, * * * to which is added the in- 
terpretations of proper names * * * as also the 
sum of all the most remarkable mythology and 
history, deduced from the names of persons 
eminent in either; and likewise the geographi- 
cal descriptions of the chief countries and cities 
in the world — a work very necessary for stran- 
gers, as well as our own countrymen, for the 
right understanding of what they discourse, 
write or read." One definition seems worth 
copying. *'Acid in chymistry/' it says, '^sig- 
nifies that sharp salt, or that potential and dis- 
solving fire which is in all mixed bodies, and 
gives 'em being. Of acids, vitriol is the chiefest, 
sea salt next to that.*' Phillips copied very 
largely from Blount, blunders and all, and added 
a considerable number of errors of his own. 
Among other things, he defines gallon as a 
measure containing two quarts; quaver as '^ a 
measure of time in music, being the half of a 
crotchet, as a crotchet is the half of a quaver ; " 
contemptuous as synonymous with contemptible 
and meaning " worthy of scorn ; '* ember-week 
as **the week before Lent;*' and he men- 



io6 Our Common Speech. 

tions Nazareth as *' the place where Christ was 
born." 

Next came, in 1677, EHsha Coles, *' school- 
master and teacher of the tongue to foreigners," 
with ^* an EngHsh dictionary explaining the 
difficult terms that are used in divinity, hus- 
bandry, physic, philosophy, law, navigation, 
mathematics and other arts and sciences " — 
claimed to contain almost thirty thousand en- 
tries. A new feature in this work is a list of 
what we should now call homonyms, pairs (or 
triplets) of words having the same sound, but 
different spellings and meanings. The preface 
criticises severely the productions of previous 
lexicographers. 

Early in the eighteenth century, 1704, was 
issued, posthumously, the English Dictionary 
of Edward Cocker, an unimportant work, though 
several times republished, with alterations and 
additions by John Hawkins, who felicitated 
himself on his success by printing as a separate 
line on the title-page the words : '* The Like 
never yet Extant." 

In 1707 appeared the anonymous *' Glosso- 
graphia Anglicana Nova, a dictionary inter- 



Old English Dictionaries. 107 

preting such hard words as are at present used 
in the Enghsh tongue/' It has a number of 
wood-cuts illustrating definitions of heraldic 
terms, this being the earliest appearance of any 
sort of pictorial illustrations in an English lexi- 
con. The author, like Phillips, had his own 
idea on the subject of acids, his statement being 
as follows : '* Acids are those bodies which pro- 
duce the taste of sharpness or sourness, caused 
from the particles of those bodies being sharp- 
pointed and piercing." 

The first period of our English lexicography 
may be said to have closed in 1708, with the 
appearance of J[ohn] K[ersey]'s ** New Eng- 
lish Dictionary, or a compleat collection of the 
most proper and significant words, and terms of 
art commonly used in the language, * * * for 
the benefit of young scholars, tradesmen, arti- 
ficers, foreigners and the female sex/' It is 
doubtful, however, whether this work is not 
almost entitled to be counted as the first of 
the second period, for in design, though per- 
haps not in execution, it goes rather beyond 
the gloss plan. It professes to omit obsolete, 
barbarous and foreign words, and originally 



io8 Our Common Speech. 

included a number of such familiar terms as 
bird-cage^ apple-tree and pigeon-hotise. These 
particular compounds, however, and probably- 
many others of the same class, were wisely 
omitted from the second edition, a duodecimo 
of about 300 pages issued in 1713, and of 
which the author modestly remarks that ^'the 
entire work (as it is now brought to perfection) 
must needs give ample content to the public." 

It has seemed worth while to describe these 
works at some length, considering that they 
make up what may be termed the incunabula 
of English lexicography. Cawdrey, first on the 
list of their authors, turned up absolutely virgin 
soil, and each of the eight who came after him 
is distinguished by a good deal of originality. 
Their books are not only, in most cases, incom- 
parably smaller than our modern dictionaries, 
but they have a very different style — they are 
conversational, almost chatty, and yet there are 
wide differences in tone, so to speak, among 
them. They constitute a class of literature 
which is distinctly of its own kind and well 
deserves separate preservation and study. 



Old English Dictionaries. 109 



II. 

A SECOND period, transitional between that 
of the glosses which preceded it and that of 
the modern dictionary, supposed to contain the 
whole language, was introduced in 1721 by the 
publication of the great work of Nathan Bailey, 
in which it was for the first time attempted to 
include *^ the generality of words in the English 
tongue." This book had a long life, which it 
well deserved, running through at least twenty- 
seven editions, many of them involving exten- 
sive alterations. Like the dictionaries of the 
present day, it was offered at different times in 
various forms and sizes, sometimes in one volume 
and sometimes in two. The most noted edition 
is the folio of 1730, a volume of nearly 900 
pages, 9 inches by 13^, a copy of which, with 
blank leaves inserted, was used by Johnson as 
the foundation of his labors. Bailey's work is 
remarkable also as marking the accented syl- 
lables of the words — which no previous author 
had done, and as containing a ^^ collection of 
proverbs, with their explanation and illustra- 



no Our Common Speech. 

tion." Thus under the entry swallow we find 
noted the adage '* one swallow does not make 
a summer," with the following explanation, 
which certainly ought to make the matter toler- 
ably clear: 

"All the false as well as the foolish conclusions 
from a particular to an universal truth fall under the 
censure of this proverb. It teaches that as he that 
guesses at the course of the year by the flight of 
one single bird is very liable to be mistaken in his 
conjecture ; so that a man cannot be denominated 
rich from one single piece of money in his pocket, 
nor accounted universally good from the practice of 
one single virtue, nor temperate because he is stout, 
nor liberal because he is exactly just ; that one day 
cannot render a man completely happy in point of 
time, nor one action consummate his glory in point 
of valor. In short, the moral of it is, that the right 
way of judging of things, beyond imposition and 
fallacy, is not from particulars, but universals.'^ 

Bailey was followed, in 1724, by Hawkins* 
enlargement of Cocker; in 1735 by Defoe's 
" Compleat English Dictionary'' — an unim- 
portant work with a consequential title — and 
by Dyche & Pardon, whose book was *' intended 



Old English Dictionaries. iii 

for the information of the unlearned, * * * not 
only in orthography * * * but in writing coher- 
ently and correctly, the want whereof is univer- 
sally complained of among the fair sex;" — not 
very gallant, these old lexicographers. In 1737 
came Sparrow, with the '* New English Diction- 
ary,'* published anonymously; in 1741, Daniel 
Penning, the ''Royal English Dictionary;'' in 
1749, Benjamin Martin, *'A New Universal 
English Dictionary;" and in 1753, John Wesley, 
the clergyman, who naturally enough defines 
Methodist as " one that lives according to the 
method laid down in the Bible," and who put on 
his title-page this '* N. B. — The author assures 
you, he thinks this is the best English diction- 
ary in the world." None of these works has 
historical importance ; Bailey will ever stand 
as the only name worth remembering between 
Kersey and Johnson. 



MODERN DICTIONARIES: WHICH 
IS THE BEST? 

The difference between the dictionaries which are 
now in use, and are daily coming into greater use — 
for the end is not yet — and those which were received 
as standards when Johnson and his hacks began to 
classify and explain the language in accordance with the 
rules of the classical languages, is the difference between 
history as written by Rollin, and Hume, and Smollett 
and Goldsmith in England, and as it has been written in 
our time by Froude, and Macaulay, and Freeman, and 
Gardiner, and other conscientious students of State 
papers and ancient correspondence. Our philologists, 
like our historians, have grown critical, and if there ever 
was a period when the study of words can be said 
to have ranked among, or even to have approximated 
to, the exact sciences, it is now. — New York Mail §- 
Express^ Editorial. 



'T^HE third or modern period of the develop- 

^ ment of English lexicography dates 

from the appearance of the Johnson of 1755 — 

a massive foHo in two volumes, on which its 



Modern Dictionaries. 113 

great author worked hard for seven years (it 
is a wonder it did not take him longer), and 
which, though it brought him very httle money, 
he had the great satisfaction of seeing received 
with the warm enthusiasm which its unique 
merits amply deserved. It is a good deal the 
fashion to make merry over Johnson and his 
definitions, and certain entries are undoubtedly 
provocative of mirth, though not always exactly 
at the expense of the author, for in many cases 
he knew perfectly well what he was about, and 
deliberately intended using his lexicography 
as a means for expressing his personal opin- 
ions — prejudices and notions, if you like to 
call them so — no matter what anybody might 
think about it. Instances of this kind are 
almost too familiar to quote. A patron^ he says, 
is *' commonly a wretch who supports with 
insolence and is paid with flattery;" 2. pension 
*' in England is generally understood to mean 
pay given to a state hireling for treason to his 
country," and a pensioner is ** a slave of state 
hired to obey his master,** while patriot is a 
term '' sometimes used for a factious disturber 
of the government." A Tory is ** one who 

8 



114 Our Common Speech. 

adheres to the ancient constitution of the 
state;" a W/ii'o;' is *' the name of a faction," and 
a Puritan is '' a sectary pretending to eminent 
purity of rehgion." Excise is *' a hateful tax 
levied upon commodities, and adjudged by 
wretches." 

In other cases, the only explanation that 
can be given of the extraordinary statements 
made is sheer carelessness and inattention. If 
we knew not the author, what kind of a sloven 
must we think him to have been who could 
define pink as '' a color used by painters," and 
bi'own as ** a color compounded of black and 
any other color"? In some cases again, as in 
ferrety ** a kind of rat," 2,ndi pastern ^ ^' the leg of 
a horse," the *' ignorance, madam, sheer igno- 
rance " that he was himself so ready to admit, 
is indisputable. In others, his Johnsonese got 
decidedly the better of his English, as when he 
tells us that network is '' anything reticulated 
or decussated, at equal distances, with inter- 
stices between the intersections." In other 
cases we find the personal element verging on 
the side of pathos, as where Grub Street is 
defined as ** a street much inhabited by writers 



Modern Dictionaries. 115 

of small histories, dictionaries and temporary 
poems ; whence any mean production is called 
* Grub Street/ " — and lexicographer as ^^ a writer 
of dictionaries, a harmless drudge/' The pa- 
thos rises into real eloquence in the elaborate 
preface to the great work, a composition which 
Home Tooke, Johnson's bitterest enemy and 
detractor in the literary world, said he could 
never read without tears. The final paragraph 
runs thus: 

*^ In this work, when it shall be found that much is 
omitted, let it not be forgotten that much likewise is 
performed ; and though no book was ever spared out of 
tenderness to the author, and the world is Httle solici- 
tous to know whence proceeded the faults of that 
which it condemns ; yet it may gratify curiosity to 
inform it, that the English Dictionary was written 
with little assistance of the learned, and without any 
patronage of the great ; not in the soft obscurities of 
retirement, or under the shelter of academic bowers, 
but amidst inconvenience and distraction, in sickness 
and in sorrow. It may repress the triumph of malig- 
nant criticism to observe, that if our language is not 
here fully displayed, I have only failed in an attempt 
which no human powers have hitherto completed. If 



ii6 Our Common Speech. 

the lexicons of ancient tongues, now immutably fixed 
and comprised in a few volumes, be yet, after the 
toil of successive ages, inadequate and delusive ; if 
the aggregated knowledge, and co-operating diligence 
of the Italian academicians, did not secure them from 
the censure of Beni, if the embodied critics of France, 
when fifty years had been spent upon their work^ 
were obliged to change its oeconomy, and give their 
second edition another form, I may surely be contented 
without the praise of perfection, which, if I could 
obtain, in this gloom of solitude, what would it avail 
me? I have protracted my work till most of those 
whom I wished to please have sunk into the grave, 
and success and miscarriage are empty sounds : I 
therefore dismiss it with frigid tranquillity, having 
little to fear or hope from censure or from praise." 

With all Its faults, Johnson s dictionary was 
a work of entirely unprecedented excellence. 
Beside coming far nearer than Bailey to includ- 
ing every word recognized at his time as good 
English, he first introduced citations from stand- 
ard authors to support his definitions, and both 
his citations and his definitions have been found 
extremely useful to subsequent lexicographers, 
insomuch that most of them have copied both, 



Modern Dictionaries. 117 

with great freedom; and notwithstanding the 
large number of the dictionaries that have since 
appeared, Johnson's, after nearly a century and 
a half, is only just now becoming obsolete. At 
the great spelling matches that excited this 
country less than twenty years ago, it may be 
remembered that the rules explicitly provided 
that any spelling recognized by Johnson should 
be regarded as correct. 

The limits of this paper will hardly permit 
any real attempt to trace satisfactorily the devel- 
opment of our popular English dictionary from 
Johnson down. In the twenty years following 
the appearance of his first edition, more than 
a dozen authors tried their hands, without greatly 
advancing the work — Jas. Buchanan, ^^ A New 
Spelling English Dictionary,'* 1/57 ; J.Peyton, 
"A New Vocabulary," 1759; D. Bellamy, '' En- 
gHsh Dictionary," 1760; J. N. Scott, '' Bailey's 
Dictionary Revised," 1764; Daniel Farro, *' The 
Royal British Grammar and Vocabulary," 1764; 
William Johnston, '* A Pronouncing and Spelling 
Dictionary," 1764; John Entick, *'A Spelling 
Dictionary of the English Language," 1764; J. 
Baskeryille, '' A Vocabulary or Pocket Diction- 



ii8 Our Common Speech. 

ary/* 1765; Wm. Rider, *' Universal English 
Dictionary," 1766; J. Seally, *'The London 
Spelling Dictionary," 1771; Fred'k Barlow, 
** A Complete English Dictionary," 1772; Wm. 
Kenrick, *' A New Dictionary," 1773, — in which 
work I believe one step forward was taken, by 
the use, for the first time, of figures over the 
vowels to indicate their sounds; Jas. Barclay, ^'A 
Complete and Universal English Dictionary," 
1774; and one or two anonymous writers. At 
1775 we must pause a moment, for in that year 
appeared the memorable work of John Ash, 
memorable as containing (in addition to the 
interesting statements that esoteric is '' an incor- 
rect spelling " of exoteric, and that Gawain was 
sister to King Arthur) perhaps the most extraor- 
dinary blunder in all lexicography — his noted 
etymology of the word curmudgeon. Johnson 
suggested that the derivation might be from the 
French coeur 7nechant (meaning evil hearty, and 
credits an unknown correspondent with the idea 
— that is, he inserts the note : *' It is a vicious 
manner of pronouncing coeur mechant, French — 
an unknown correspondent." In Ash's book we 
find the amazing statement that curmudgeon is 



Modern Dictionaries. 119 

*^ from the French c(rtir, unknown, and "inechanty 
a correspondent'*! Think of the quahfication 
for work at EngHsh lexicography that a man 
must have possessed whose knowledge of the 
most elementary French was so absolutely non- 
existent, and whose lack of common sense 
was so stupendous, as to render this sort of 
performance possible ! And the best of it is 
that in the *' advertisement " prefixed to the 
work, we are assured that in the derivations 
from other languages *' special attention has 
been given to the mere English scholar by a 
proper analysis and full explanation of the 
originals " ! 

Ash was followed, in the same year, by Perry, 
and then by an anonymous *' pocket dictionary ** 
(1779), and in 1780 by Sheridan, who first, as 
I believe, re-spelled words in order to indicate 
the pronunciation. Then came Harwood's revi- 
sion of Bailey (1782), Lemon (1783), Fry's 
'* Vocabulary of Difficult Words'' (1784), Pi- 
card (1790), and the next year (1791) John 
Walker with his *' Critical Pronouncing Dic- 
tionary," which ran through thirty or forty 
editions and still retains its place as an import- 



I20 Our Common Speech. 

ant authority, at least on questions of orthoepy, 
within the memory of persons now hving. 
Walker paid little attention to etymology, and 
*^with respect to the explanation of words, 
except in very few instances, * * * scrupulously 
followed Johnson,'* whose dictionary, he adds, 
*^ has been deemed lawful plunder by every 
subsequent lexicographer." The great feature 
of his work is the attention paid in it to pronun- 
ciation, an elaborate treatise on that subject 
being prefixed, together with certain rather 
amusing ** rules to be observed by the natives 
of Scotland, Ireland and London, for avoiding 
their respective peculiarities/' 

Walker was followed by William Scott (1797), 
Stephen Jones ^ ( 1 798), Fulton & Knight ^ ( 1 802), 
William Perry^ (1805), Thos. Browne, (1806), 
Wm. Enfield (1807), W. F. Mylius (18—), 
Christopher Earnshaw {circ, 181 5), R. S. Jame- 
son^ (1827), Saml. Maunder (1830), David 
Booth (183s), James Knowles (1835), B. H. 

1 These authors, as well as Walker and Sheridan, are the 
orthoepists cited in the " synopsis of words differently 
pronounced by different authorities," in the early editions 
of Webster. ■ • 



Modern Dictionaries. 121 

Smart (1836), sundry anonymous writers, and 
various revisions and enlargements of older 
works, of which much the most important is the 
Todd's Johnson of 18 18; but the next contri- 
bution of real and original value to the science, 
in England, was not made until 1836, when 
Charles Richardson, ^* firmly persuaded that 
* * * a new dictionary ought to be written, and 
of a very different kind indeed from anything 
yet attempted anywhere,'' endeavored to supply 
the want. The great desideratum in such a 
work, he thought, was '* a collection of usages 
quoted from, in general, our best English 
authors, and those usages explained to suit the 
quotations; and those explanations including 
within them a portion of the sense pertaining 
to other words in the sentence." The citations, 
accordingly, constitute the distinctive feature 
of the work. They were collected with great 
diligence and in much abundance and variety, 
a period of about five centuries having been 
reviewed, beginning with Robert of Gloucester, 
contemporaneous with Edward the First, and 
ending about the year 1800. Richardson's 
work has always been of high interest to schol- 



122 Our Common Speech. 

ars, and is the first not founded on Johnson ; 
but the vocabulary, the definitions, and the 
marks indicating the orthoepy, are ahke insuffi- 
cient to meet the popular demand, and it has 
never, perhaps, been fully appreciated. It 
makes two quarto volumes, 2224 pages in all, 
three columns to the page, resembling quite 
closely in dimensions the recent editions of 
Webster's Unabridged. 

Following Richardson came Reid (1844), 
Sullivan (1847), Boag (1848), Craig (1849), and 
then (in 1850) Ogilvie, with the first edition 
of the great Imperial, which was afterwards 
revised and materially improved by Annandale, 
was generally regarded for a long time as the 
standard authority in Great Britain, and had 
the honor of serving as a sort of foundation 
for the much greater Century. It may gratify 
American pride to know that the Imperial was 
avowedly based on our own Webster, which is 
spoken of in the preface as not only superior 
to Richardson and Todd's Johnson, ^' but su- 
perior to every other dictionary hitherto pub- 
lished." In its latest form (1882), the Imperial 
makes four large octavo volumes of seven or 



Modern Dictionaries. 123 

eight hundred pages each, and contains about 
130,000 entries, illustrated by more than three 
thousand engravings. In the length of its 
vocabulary, the extent of its definitions, and 
the number and excellence of its illustrations, 
it far outshone any similar work previously 
issued in Great Britain, being indeed the first 
to combine largely the features of a cyclopaedia 

— which explains things — with those of a 
dictionary — which defines words; the sub-title 
** A Complete Encyclopaedic Lexicon, Literary, 
Scientific and Technological," is fully justified 
by the contents. 

The works of Wright and Clarke (both pub- 
lished in 1855) and of Cooley and Nuttall 
(both in 1 861) detracted little from the fame 
of the Imperial. Latham's Todd's Johnson 
(1866) was a more important work and long 
enjoyed great popularity in England. A much 
more formidable rival to the Imperial, however, 

— meeting it exactly on its own ground — is 
the Encyclopaedic, the first volume of which 
appeared in 1879 ^^d the seventh and last in 
'88, labor having begun on it as far back as 
'72. This is a very extensive work, containing 



124 ^^^ Common Speech. 

nearly 6,000 pages and about 180,000 words or 
headings. It carries the encyclopaedic features 
even beyond the point reached by the Imperial, 
and is fully illustrated and handsomely printed. 
Some omissions are a little remarkable, espe- 
cially perhaps that of the word fair as signifying 
an exhibition — a use of the word now quite 
common in Great Britain as well as the United 
States; and sweeny, a disease of the horse. 
(The latter term, however, seems to be missing 
in all dictionaries except the International, the 
Century and the Standard.) A still more 
curious feature in the Encyclopaedic is the 
remarkable blunder of using the word molasses 
as a plural — *' a tank having a perforated bot- 
tom, through which the molasses escape,'' — art. 
" Tiger ^^ II., 2. This dictionary was republished 
in Philadelphia in 1894, "Americanized '' in re- 
spect to a number of its definitions, and bound 
in the more convenient form of four volumes, 
each containing some 1340 pages of about the 
size of the International. 

Another most excellent British work, though 
of very different character, is Stormonth's, first 
issued in October, 1871, and nine times repub- 



Modern Dictionaries. 125 

lished, the latest form being the large-type 
edition of 1884. It is an extremely sound and 
scholarly work, though well adapted to the 
needs of the general public, a great wealth of 
trustworthy information being condensed into 
small compass, and very clearly as well as 
briefly stated. It has no quotations and no 
engravings, but it is questionable whether either 
of these features has really proper place in a 
dictionary of language, strictly so called; and 
it is not too much to say that for the ordinary 
purposes of hasty reference, when encyclopae- 
dic information is not sought for, a person 
having Stormonth's dictionary at hand will in 
only exceptional cases and at long intervals 
regret the absence of any other. It represents, 
in fact, the very highest development of the 
English word-book, pure and simple. 

The first English dictionary published in 
this country was the work, strangely enough, 
of a man really named Samuel Johnson, Jr. — 
a small book, intended for schools, and issued 
just before the opening of the present century. 
Next, in 1800, came Elliott's, Mr. Johnson's 
name appearing as co-editor, while among those 



126 Our Common Speech. 

who signed commendations of the value of the 
work was Noah Webster. 

Of other American dictionaries, only four 
require notice, and Worcester's may be most 
briefly disposed of. The author of this noble 
work came first before the public in 1827, with 
a revised edition of Todd's Johnson combined 
with Walker, but only three years later issued 
his own *' Comprehensive Dictionary,'' and in 
1835 his ** Elementary Dictionary for Common 
Schools.'' These were both small works, his 
more ambitious '* Universal and Critical Dic- 
tionary" not coming out until 1846, and his 
main work, as we have it now, not until i860, 
though his earlier books had been in the mean 
time more than once reissued with considerable 
enlargement In its final form, Worcester's 
dictionary is in a high degree creditable to the 
scholarship, the judgment and the industry of 
its distinguished author. It was long the favorite 
of the more cultured users of such books, who 
appreciated the great care which Dr. Worcester 
always employed to ascertain and record the 
best practice in both spelling and pronuncia- 
tion. But, even with the inconvenient addition 



Modern Dictionaries. 127 

of the Supplement of 1881, Worcester is now 
too far behind the times to render the greatest 
practical service. I have myself happened to 
notice, from time to time, the absence of a 
considerable number of words and uses of words 
now quite common. Examples are: Furore, 
coral of lobster, mat of a picture frame, maa^aine^ 
ensilage^ casket in the sense of coffin, rep, boycott, 
toboggan, apiculture, skewbald, szveeny, muley, 
dynamo-electric, pigeon English, solid-colored, 
jobmaster, ninepence, hectograph, self-contained, 
maverick — and the list could doubtless be 
run up into the hundreds, by comparison with 
later works. It still contains, moreover, what 
Dr. Webster would call the '* nonsensical " word 
phantomnation, defined as *^ illusion '' — a word 
which is not a word, being taken by misappre- 
hension from a passage of Pope, as quoted by 
one Richard Paul Jodrell in a work called 
'* Philology of the English Language," issued 
in 1820 as a sort of supplement to Johnson's 
dictionary. The passage is : 

These solemn vows and holy offerings paid 
To all the phantom nations of the dead. 

Odyssey, X. 627. 



128 Our Common Speech. 

Jodrell had a great fancy for printing com- 
pound words solid, without a hyphen to indicate 
their component parts. So he wrote ** phan- 
tomnations '' as one word, and Dr. Worcester 
took it up. From him it passed to Webster's 
Unabridged (though it does not appear in the 
International), to the Imperial (though it does 
not appear in the Century), and to the Encyclo- 
paedic — showing the remarkable vitality that 
a simple blunder, which might originally have 
been avoided by a little care, will sometimes 
possess. Unless Worcester's dictionary be en- 
tirely revised and greatly extended, it seems 
certain very shortly to follow Johnson into " in- 
nocuous desuetude " so far as practical service 
is concerned, though, like Johnson also, it will 
forever remain an interesting — yes, and an 
imposing — monument of the achievements of 
the past. 

And now we come to Webster, first pub- 
lished, a small book, in 1806, and again — in 
another form, specially intended for school use 
— in 1807. These works were, however, only 
preliminary to the greater undertaking, the well- 
known ** Unabridged,*' which appeared in two 



Modern Dictionaries. 129 

volumes, quarto, in 1828, and was reissued, en- 
larged, in two volumes, large octavo, in 1840 — 
this being the last edition with which Webster 
himself had anything to do. In 1847 appeared, 
under the editorship of Prof. Goodrich, a new 
edition, in the single square-volume style now 
so familiar; in 1859 another; in 1864 another, 
edited by Dr. Noah Porter, to which was added, 
in 1879, an extended supplement; and in 1890, 
the great Webster International, a work on 
which many of the ablest minds of the world 
were long employed, and on which no less 
than $300,000 is said to have been expended 
by the publishers before a single copy was 
printed. 

To avoid danger of misapprehension, one 
must choose w^ords very carefully in pronoun- 
cing any sort of critical opinion of Webster's 
dictionary. In its earlier editions it was unrea- 
sonably denounced ; in its later forms it has been 
in certain respects greatly over-valued. A pop- 
ular writer has said that in its original form it 
was something for Americans to laugh at and 
be ashamed of — which is just about as true as 
the pronunciamento of a great British philolo- 

9 



ijo Our Common Speech. 

gist to the effect that Johnson's dictionary was 
a disgrace to the language. Abuse like this only 
pillories the abusers, in after time, as either ex- 
tremely rash and inconsiderate in their state- 
ments, culpably ignorant or careless of essential 
facts, or controlled by some sort of bias or 
unreasonable prejudice. On the other hand, it 
savors of absurdity to quote Webster as '' au- 
thority'' on any doubtful point, either in the 
minor matters of orthoepy and spelling, or in 
the far more important matter of definition. 
The plan on which the author at first proceeded, 
and the plans on which every revision of his 
work has been conducted, were such as abso- 
lutely to take the book out of the class of au- 
thorities, properly speaking, if by authority is 
understood, as I think it clearly should be, the 
representation of what is recognized as the best 
actual practice. Dr. Webster's original idea 
was to exhibit the language, not as it then ex- 
isted, but as he thought it should be ; the plan 
pursued since his death has been to admit every 
sort of vagary that has attained any degree of 
general circulation, insomuch that it has been 
said that there is no slovenly or improper use 



Modern Dictionaries. 131 

of an English word ever heard in decent society 
for which the authority of Webster cannot be 
cited. The statement does the dictionary in- 
justice; it is not meant to be an authority, in 
the sense in which the word is used; and yet I 
think there can be no doubt that on account of 
the general misconception that has prevailed on 
this point, and the consequent idea that any- 
thing admitted to Webster must be correct, the 
dictionary, with its enormous popularity, has 
been a potent agent in injuring our language. 
By injuring, is meant, rendering the English 
tongue less clearly intelligible and definite, so 
that it is now in some degree an inferior instru- 
ment for conveying thought from man to man 
to what it would presumably have been, without 
this influence. Variations in spelling and in pro- 
nunciation are of little moment, from the stand- 
point of practical daily life; the admission of 
new words, no matter how ''slangy'* or ill- 
formed, is very often a positive gain ; and the 
use of old words in figurative and rhetorical 
senses naturally connected with the original 
significance is of course a privilege which any 
one may freely take, with a clear conscience. 



132 Our Common Speech. 

But the blundering use of words to signify what 
they do not mean tends just so far to confuse 
communication between persons using the lan- 
guage thus treated, and to hasten the ultimate 
destruction of the language itself. The recog- 
nition, in a book like Webster's dictionary, of 
pretty nearly every sort of erroneous use of 
common words that the editors have observed, 
without warning the reader of the impropriety 
of such use, naturally induces the supposition 
that the lexicographer not only explains the 
error, but lends it his authority as correct, thus 
aiding and abetting in the process of depraving 
the tongue. And all this may be said, and said 
emphatically, without the slightest disrespect to 
the ability, the learning, the energy, the achieve- 
ments, of the great scholars who have collabor- 
ated in producing the inestimably useful work 
under review. Many blessings for which we 
cannot be too grateful have connected with 
them features that may render them susceptible 
of inflicting very serious injury, if unskillfully 
used. Such a blessing is Webster's dictionary. 

Of works designed for popular circulation, 
only two others call for remark. The first and 



Modern Dictionaries. 



^33 



greatest is the magnificent Century, a dictionary 
which not only has 215,000 words, but which 
comes near to being a cyclopedia as well, and 
which is almost beyond criticism in its execution, 
literary, artistic and mechanical. This work is 
too recent, and at the same time too well known, 
to need extended description or eulogy. But it 
may be proper to note, as one of its minor 
merits most likely to escape observation, that 
the editors have been more careful than those 
of Webster to warn the reader not to quote 
their work as authority for the improper uses of 
terms which they explain. Excellent examples 
of the difference may be found in the two words 
centenary and demean. Each dictionary recog- 
nizes the fact that the former, centenary, which 
means merely hundredth, is often employed as if 
it had something to do with the Latin annum, dind 
were therefore descriptive of a period of a hun- 
dred years ; and Webster, dropping no hint that 
such use is a mistake, might naturally be quoted 
as '^ authorizing " it, whereas the Century dis- 
tinctly informs the reader that the practice 
referred to has arisen from confusing centenary 
with the quite different word centennial. Simi- 



134 O^J* Common Speech. 

larly, we find in Webster, among other defini- 
tions of the verb demean^ these : ^^ To debase, 
to lower, to degrade." A note, to be sure, is 
added that this use of the word '^ is probably 
due to a false etymology ; '' but no hint is given 
that such use is not now universally approved, 
and (as is the case of centenary for centennial) 
Webster might therefore naturally enough be 
quoted as ^' authorizing " it. The Century says 
that the verb to demean, when used in the sense 
referred to, is ^' illegitimate in origin, inconven- 
ient in use," and '' avoided by scrupulous writ- 
ers." If people will persist in the mistake, they 
certainly cannot quote the Century as support- 
ing them, and they may so quote Webster. The 
latter therefore is to some extent responsible 
for the injury to the language which follows 
every such error; the former is not. It must be 
regretfully added, however, that in the case of 
one wretched vulgarism — chiefly confined, I 
believe, to the northern United States — the 
Century is worse than Webster. This is the use 
of the verb claim as meaning merely to assert, 
where there is really no claiming in the matter. 
Webster marks it as ''colloquial," thus giving it 



Modern Dictionaries. 135 

at least a qualified disapproval; the Century 
says only that this is '' a common use, regarded 
by many as inelegant," thus implying that many 
other persons are of a contrary opinion, and that 
the expression may well enough pass muster. 
The explanation lies probably in the curious fact 
that Prof. Whitney, the editor of the Century, has 
been caught in this blunder himself — it occurs 
at least twice in his *^ Elements of English Pro- 
nunciation " — and he was therefore naturally 
loth to characterize it as he must of course 
know that it deserves, in his dictionary. One 
other oddity of this great work, not an error, how- 
ever, has amused some readers, — the insertion, 
in the article ** question^' of the suggestive 
entry, ^'popping the question — see pop!" 

And finally, we have the Standard dictionary, 
published in 1894 — ^ very handsome book, 
containing about 1 100 pages somewhat larger 
than those of the International and somewhat 
smaller, but more closely printed, than those of 
the Century. Like the last-named work, it is 
constructed on the cyclopaedia plan, and it in- 
deed far surpasses, in certain cyclopaedic fea- 
tures — as in the articles apple ^ constellation^ dog. 



136 Our Common Speech. 

fowly and particularly the extended treatises 
under coin and geology — the Century itself. To 
my own thinking, this great elaboration of 
special topics in a dictionary of English words 
is rather undesirable. The Century, it seems 
to me, goes quite far enough in that direction, 
including as it does about all the general infor- 
mation in regard to things (as distinguished 
from words) that one would be likely to go to 
a dictionary to find; and much of the added 
matter of the Standard — such as the two and 
a half columns devoted to the description of 
hundreds of varieties of the apple, with their 
relative advantages for different divisions of the 
country — seems almost ludicrously out of place 
in a work that belongs, after all, to the depart- 
ment of philology. It is moreover extremely 
difficult to preserve due proportion between 
different parts of the work, if minute elaboration 
of the kind referred to is indulged in; and the 
editors of the Standard have not invariably suc- 
ceeded beyond criticism. To the 'diX\\z\^ geology, 
for instance, they devote considerably more than 
two pages, inserting a complicated and doubt- 
less very valuable chart of the crust of the earth 



Modern Dictionaries. 137 

and its fossils, while the (as one would suppose) 
at least equally interesting science of astronomy 
is dismissed with a mere definition. Why not 
give us at least a map of the solar system? 

Not only, however, is the Standard rather 
ill-proportioned in its information about things ; 
it is also — a graver fault — somewhat incon- 
sistent with itself in the important matter of its 
treatment of a large class of words — the words 
that are often misused. In some cases, as in 
the application of the term buck to the male of 
the sheep (distinctly " authorized " by the Inter- 
national), it goes to the extreme of ignoring the 
error altogether ; in others, as in demean in the 
sense oi debase^ it follows the Century by noting 
the usage but marking it as wrong ; in still 
others, as centenary for centennial^ aggravate for 
irritate^ and circumstance for event, it is as bad 
as Webster, giving the reader no warning that 
these uses of the words will mark him as at least 
careless of the finer proprieties of speech; and 
it gives place with seeming approval to the 
absurd vocable helpmeet, A dictionary of Eng- 
lish should do one thing or the other. It may 
record without comment all common words and 



138 Our Common Speech. 

all common uses of words, proceeding on the 
conception that a lexicographer is a compiler 
and an explainer, not a critic ; but if the attempt 
is made to distinguish right usage from that 
which must tend to the deterioration of the 
language as a vehicle of thought, care should 
be taken not to pass gross blunders without 
characterizing them as what they are. 

It is now a pleasure to hasten to admit that 
these defects in the Standard are not of a nature 
to disturb one user of English dictionaries out 
of a hundred ; and to say emphatically that the 
solid merits of the work are remarkable and 
distinguished. Greater care seems to have been 
taken in its preparation than was ever taken 
before, to secure on every even minute point 
the best matured opinions of the best equipped 
experts ; and as the definitions are generally 
models of conciseness and precision, one can 
hardly ever fail to obtain from its pages the 
fact that he seeks, quickly, fully, accurately, 
and with every reason to depend on the correct- 
ness of the information furnished. A single 
illustration may be given. The word abacus^ as 
used in the 35th chapter of Ivanhoe to designate 



Modern Dictionaries^ 139 

the staff of office of the grand master of the 
Knights Templars, appears in no previous dic- 
tionary ; it is found in the Standard, and not 
only that, but the reader is informed that Scott 
erred in using it, the proper term being bacillus. 
A dictionary that goes so far as to indicate a 
trifling slip like this, which may probably have 
occurred once only in our literature, may safely 
be presumed not to omit much that the most 
inquisitive reader is likely to wish to find. The 
Standard will certainly prove of immense value, 
and exceedingly convenient for ready reference. 
Moreover, its wood engravings compare favor- 
ably with those in the Century, and its colored 
plates are more beautiful than anything of the 
kind that was ever attempted before. Alto- 
gether, it is a work of which the country that 
gave it birth has good reason to be proud. 

With the Standard, closes for the present the 
list of English dictionaries designed for popular 
use ; but the greatest dictionary that was ever 
compiled of any language is still to be men- 
tioned — a dictionary, however, intended only 
for students and scholars. This is the badly 
named '^ New English Dictionary on Historical 



140 Our Common Speech. 

Principles, founded mainly on the materials col- 
lected by the [British] Philological Society, and 
edited by Dr. James A. H. Murray,'' — or, to 
adopt the short title generally used, the '^ Mur- 
ray Philological/' It will probably make some 
nine volumes, each of them three quarters as 
thick as the Webster International and hav- 
ing considerably larger pages, quite as closely 
printed and no space taken up by illustrations, — 
accommodating an immense quantity of matter. 
But the bulk of this dictionary, enormous as 
it is, must be regarded as merely an incidental 
feature, so to speak, of its unique and unap- 
proached value. The main point is that we 
have in it a complete history of every English 
word from its appearance to our own time, with 
full explanation of its etymology, its original 
meaning in English, and the changes in form, 
use or significance which it may have undergone, 
accompanied with citations, historically arranged, 
and so stated as to render reference extremely 
easy. An illustration will show the working of 
the plan. The word by-product, common as it 
now is, had appeared in no previous dictionary. 
Yet Dr. Murray found it in a work published in 



Modern Dictionaries. 141 

1857 — Eliza Acton's '' English Bread Book": 
*' German yeast in many distilleries forms an 
important by-product/' Quotations are added 
from a scientific work issued in 1879 and a Lon- 
don newspaper of August 24, 1882, the last 
being perhaps considered sufficient to indicate 
that the term had then become a part of our 
every-day speech. Or take the noun American, 
This is defined, first, as ** an aborigine of the 
American continent, now called an * American 
Indian/ " Four apt quotations follow, the first 
dated 1578 and indicating the very earliest use 
of the word that has been discovered, and the 
last 1777, being the latest instance known of its 
use in the signification referred to. Then 
follows the second definition — *' a native of 
America of European descent, esp, a citizen of 
the United States " — with other four quota- 
tions, dated respectively 1765, 1775, 1809 and 
1882. The paragraph presents, as will be seen, 
a complete history of the word, showing that 
it began to be used toward the end of the six- 
teenth century; that it continued to bear its 
original significance, as indicating one of the 
savages encountered by the European discover- 



142 Our Common Speech. 

ers and explorers of this continent, for about 
two hundred years, after which time it came to 
indicate a white settler, and was ultimately re- 
stricted, in common speech, to a resident of one 
particular part of America, the United States. 

The gratification, to any person who cares to 
pursue even desultory and superficial study of 
our language, of having such information as 
this, so accurate, so full, so sententiously ex- 
pressed — is unspeakable ; but think of the labor 
of compiling it ! No one man, no ordinary as- 
sociation of men, could have made any consider- 
able headway in an undertaking so colossal. 
Only by the aid of hundreds of voluntary assis- 
tants, all over the English-speaking world, work- 
ing together energetically and persistently, could 
the design have been executed. It is therefore 
not surprising that more than a quarter of a 
century elapsed between the time when the 
proposal to compile such a dictionary was first 
considered by the Philological Society (in 1857), 
and the appearance of the first installment (in 
1884). The work was not prosecuted syste- 
matically and steadily during all this period, 
however, the interest in accomplishing it, intense 



Modern Dictionaries. 143 

at first, having wavered for a time and then 
revived. When the present editor took charge, 
in 1879, he found that '' upwards of two million 
quotations had been amassed," the paper slips 
on which they were noted weighing, together 
with correspondence and other necessary ma- 
terial, about two tons ! There was not nearly 
enough, however; and Dr. Murray applied him- 
self no less energetically to the task of getting 
more readers at work than to that of putting in 
order the accumulations already in hand. The 
assistance of some 1300 persons, examining the 
works of more than 5000 authors, was ultimately 
secured; and about 3,500,000 quotations had 
been gathered (and arranged in preliminary 
shape by thirty sub-editors) before the final 
writing of the work was actually begun. During 
the last fifteen or twenty years, steady progress 
has been made, and it would seem that the com- 
pletion of the colossal undertaking might reason- 
ably be expected early in the coming century. 
The letters A, B and C, filling the first two vol- 
umes, are complete ; so also is Ey which will 
constitute the last part of Vol. 3 ; portions of 
Z) and of i^ have been issued; and G and H 



144 Our Common Speech. 

are in active preparation. If the relative pro- 
portions of this dictionary prove to be not un- 
like those of others, the completion of H will 
leave not greatly more than half yet to be 
published. 

II. 

It will by this time have been perceived, if 
not previously understood, that the question 
which forms the second part of the title of this 
chapter — a question very often asked of per- 
sons supposed to have paid special attention to 
such matters — cannot be answered by naming 
a single work. You might almost as well un- 
dertake to pick out the '' best " magazine, the 
*' best '' college, the *^best*' medicine. If by 
** best " is understood the highest real excel- 
lence, there can be no question that for full 
explanation of the history of our words in Eng- 
lish, Murray is incomparably superior to any 
other; but the inquirer may have, probably has, 
some quite different kind of superiority in mind. 
If it is the etymology of our words that he is 
after, and their relationship with each other — 
due weight being given to the important con- 



Modern Dictionaries. 145 

siderations of clearness and brevity — Skeat ^ is 
decidedly the best; for matters of spelling and 
pronunciation, where of course there is room 
for difference of opinion, many good judges 
prefer respectively Worcester and perhaps on 
the whole Stormonth ; for explanations of the 
things that words indicate, as well as the words 
themselves, one should select the Century, the 
Encyclopaedic or the Standard ; for general 
and hasty reference in everything, remembering 
that good and bad English is recognized in 
that work on about equal terms, Webster. 
Here are eight '^ bests " to choose from. 

But as the question is commonly asked, it 
probably means something more like this: 
*' What English dictionary is at the present day 
the best purchase for an American who does 
not intend seriously to study the language, but 
desires one such work, and one only, for the 
purpose of settling off-hand the questions on 
which one naturally goes to a dictionary as the 

^ A most admirable work, but not a general dictionary, 
being devoted entirely to etymology. It is published in two 
forms, the original quarto and the entirely re-written and 
re-arranged octavo — the latter being in some respects actually 
preferable to the former. 

10 



146 Our Common Speech. 

readiest source of information? '^ This modi- 
fication puts Skeat and Murray out of court at 
once. Indispensable to the philologist, they 
would be very bad purchases to the general 
reader; the first he would find utterly useless, 
and while the second contains about all that he 
might want, it contains also so much else that 
he would be buying — from his point of view 
— a bushel of chaff for a pint or so of grain. 
Another admirable work, Worcester, it is also 
unadvisable for anybody but a regular collector 
of dictionaries now to buy, for reasons already 
given; it is practically antiquated. If one 
wants a cyclopaedia and dictionary combined, 
and does not object to paying $60, the Cen- 
tury would be the natural choice. The Stan- 
dard, at $12, is however relatively very much 
cheaper; and the Americanized Encyclopaedic, 
costing only half that sum, though a larger 
work, is much cheaper still — decidedly and 
greatly the cheapest dictionary ever published, 
though by no means a handsome work, and 
to critical book-buyers rather unsatisfactory 
from the very fact of its having been worked 
over for the American market. If one wants 



Modern Dictionaries. 147 

only a dictionary of words, without explana- 
tions of things, the latest and largest Stor- 
month, costing $6, should suit him perfectly. 
For a small dictionary for school use and simi- 
lar purposes, one of the earlier editions of the 
same work is, on the whole, I think, preferable 
to any other. Here, as elsewhere, different men 
have different opinions, and for steady use the 
small type might be objectionable to some per- 
sons. But the book contains so much more mat- 
ter than any other of the same size, and such 
excellent matter at that, as to present unique 
attractions ; precious things are often done up 
in small parcels. Midway between the pure 
word-books and the cyclopaedic compilations, 
stands the $10 International — a sort of happy 
compromise, and there is no denying that a cer- 
tain interest will long attach, in this country, to 
knowing exactly what ''Webster" says. It 
should be noted, finally, — as another point to 
perplex the chooser and the adviser — that the 
colored plates of the International and the Stan- 
dard furnish full and accurate information on 
a number of subjects which are perhaps not often 
in question, but on which, when one does wish 



148 Our Common Speech. 

to investigate them, it is extremely difficult to 
find the facts clearly stated, outside of these 
works. 

III. 

Three curiosities of English lexicography 
may be mentioned in closing. One is the repro- 
duction, by several publishers, forty years after 
its original appearance (the copyright having 
meanwhile expired), of the Webster Unabridged 
of 1847. It was photographed page by page, 
and what are practically stereotype plates exe- 
cuted from the photographs, at a small fraction 
of what would have been the cost of re-setting 
in type. From these plates various editions, 
exhibiting various degrees of bad printing, were 
worked off, generally on miserable paper, and 
with very flimsy binding, rendering it possible to 
sell the work at a trifling sum, a dollar or less. 
Thousands of copies must have been marketed, 
the name *^ Webster Unabridged " being enough, 
it seems, to float them. The transaction exhib- 
its in strong light the immense popularity of 
Webster's work. What other dictionary forty 
years old would have a ghost of a chance of 
finding itself thus resurrected? 



Modern Dictionaries. 149 

The second curiosity to be mentioned is ^* The 
Progressive Dictionary," pubhshed by the Rev. 
Dr. Samuel Fallows in 1883, and described on 
the title-page as '^ a supplementary word-book 
to all the leading dictionaries of the United 
States and Great Britain, containing over forty 
thousand new words, definitions, and phrases.' 
It has between 500 and 600 pages, of about the 
size of those of the last Webster's Unabridged, 
and was sold for $5. 

The third, perhaps most curious of all, is the 
*' Dictionary of English Phrases,'' prepared by 
a full-blooded native of China, Mr. Kwong Ki 
Chiu, and published in 1881. This is really a 
dictionary of English words, though confined 
to such as are used in idiomatic expressions 
which have meanings that could not readily be 
ascertained from the ordinary definitions of 
their component words; and it is intended 
chiefly for the benefit of foreigners learning 
our language. As the introduction says : ** * To 
give ear,' in the literal sense, would mean some- 
thing which requires no expression, since no 
such thing ever takes place; but the ear has 
been made to stand for the office or use which 



150 Our Common Speech. 

the ear was organized to serve, and the phrase, 
* to give ear,' has been coined to express the 
idea of Hstening or giving one's attention." 
The book is an octavo of over nine hundred 
pages — containing, however, some appended 
matter about the history of China, with a sketch 
of the life of Christ, all which will be found in- 
teresting, and quite out of the ordinary run — 
to use a phrase that might well have claimed 
Mr. Kwong's attention, though he seems to 
have overlooked it. He did not overlook much, 
however ; and while of course the book can have 
little or no practical value for persons to whom 
the knowledge of English came as a birthright, 
no collection of lexicons of our language is com- 
plete without it. The task of compiling such a 
work would be, one might think, just about the 
very last and most hopeless literary enterprise 
that it would ever enter the mind of a Chinaman 
to undertake. 



AMERICAN ENGLISH. 

And you may have a pretty considerable good sort 
of a feeble notion that it don't fit nohow ; and that it 
ain't calculated to make you smart overmuch ; and that 
you don't feel 'special bright, and by no means first-rate, 
and not at all tonguey ; and that, however rowdy you 
may be by natur', it does use you up com-plete, and that's 
a fact; and makes you quake considerable, and disposed 
toe damn the engine 1 — All of which phrases, I beg to 
add, are pure Americanisms of the first water. — Charles 
Dickens^ Letter to John Forster. 

nPHE time-honored jokes about the ^'Ameri- 
^ can language," if not entirely antiquated, 
have at least for the most part changed their 
longitude from the meridian of Greenwich. A 
recent attempt dates from the land of the 
Pharaohs. Riaz Pacha, late President of the 
Egyptian Council, is said to have retorted, on 
being rallied by an American for supporting 
so patiently the British yoke, that in one respect 
at least the English were making greater pro- 
gress in the United States than in the East, 
inasmuch as he was credibly informed that 



152 Our Common Speech. 

their language was now almost universally 
spoken among the Americans ! This is per- 
haps endurable; but it would subject one's 
politeness to a pretty severe strain, now-a-days, 
to be expected to appear greatly amused at a 
story about compliments paid in Great Britain 
to the good English spoken by some excep- 
tional traveler from New York or Boston. 
Serious references, moreover, like that of Dean 
Alford, in his ridiculous book with a ridiculous 
title, ^ to **the process of deterioration '' which 
the language *'has undergone at the hands of 
the Americans,'' are not often found in British 
publications of recent date, except when accom- 
panied (as was the dean's) ^ by some display 
of insular prejudice or crass ignorance in regard 
to the history, geography or politics of the 

1 *' The Queen's English '* — as if phrases like " the King's 
English," " the King's highway," the " King's evil," needed 
correction in gender when the sovereign happens to be a 
woman ! 

2 " Look," he says, speaking of " the Americans," and 
writing in 1864, " at those phrases which so amuse us in 
their speech and books ; . . . and then compare the char- 
acter and history of the nation ; ... its reckless and fruitless 
maintenance of the most cruel and unprincipled war in the 
history of the world ! " 



American English. 153 

United States, such as would naturally dis- 
qualify the writer, in the mind of an impartial 
judge, as a critic of anything pertaining to 
this country. The testimony of well-informed 
British writers of the present day is, in fact, 
more generally in accord with that of Sir 
George Campbell: '*0f the body of the 
[American] people it may be said that their 
language is a little better than that used in 
any county of England." ^ 

Yet one does occasionally see, even in these 
days, remarks in Dean Alford's tone in high- 
class British periodicals. So late as Aug. 28, 
1892, the fashionable Court Journal of London 
informed its readers that '* the inhabitants " of 
the United States ** have so far progressed with 
their self-inflicted task of creating an American 
language that much of their conversation is 
incomprehensible to English people." A few 
years earlier, the Westminster Review said, 
editorially, that ^^ the modifications which 
differentiate 'American' from English are for 
the most part vulgarisms, which, while they 
heighten the effect of comic writing, are blots 
1 '' White and Black," p. 23. 



154 Our Common Speech. 

on more serious productions.'* Some months 
earHer still, but long after Alford's time, so 
important a periodical as the Nineteenth Cen- 
tury gave place to an article, by Dr. Fitzed- 
ward Hall, in which it was gravely, as well as 
elegantly, stated that William Cullen Bryant 
lived *' among a people among whom our lan- 
guage is daily becoming more and more 
depraved," and that whoever compares the 
diction of ** Edgar Huntly,'' an almost forgotten 
novel published in 1799, with Mr. Bryant's 
letters, *' the English of which is not much 
worse than that of ninety-nine out of every 
hundred of his college-bred compatriots, will 
very soon become aware to what degree the 
art of writing our language has declined among 
educated '' people in the United States ! 

The last quoted deliverance is perhaps the 
only one of the three that merits serious consid- 
eration, for the reason that Dr. Hall is a recog- 
nized authority in philology, whereas we know 
nothing as to the qualifications to discuss such 
matters that may or may not be possessed by 
the anonymous writers referred to. Dr. Hall's 
statement, if correct, is certainly alarming, and 



American English. 155 

we had better hearken to the words of reproof 
and mend our ways before the mother tongue, 
depraved beyond hope by our evil communi- 
cations, declines in this country into utter 
worthlessness. Two considerations, neverthe- 
less, may afford a ray of hope that the case 
is not altogether desperate. One is, that our 
censor is — not a Briton, as might be supposed, 
but one of those extraordinary Americans of 
the ** Carroll Gansevoort'* -^ stripe who seem to 
regard it rather as matter of regret than other- 
wise that they were not born in Europe, and 
who commonly out-British the British them- 
selves in reviling the customs of the United 
States; it is just possible, therefore, that his 
judgment may not be absolutely impartial and 

1 In Edgar Fawcett's bright story, " A Gentleman of Lei- 
sure," Mr. Gansevoort, a New Yorker by birth, who " would 
have considered himself disgraced if he wore a pair of trousers 
or carried an umbrella that was not of English make," 
rebukes a friend for committing the frightful Americanism 
of saying that he fished with a pole (instead of a rod), and 
on the culprit's perpetrating the further enormity of speak- 
ing of catching four dozen fine trout, remarks : " Upon 
my word, I beg your pardon, old fellow, but it always amuses 
them so on the other side when we speak about catching fish. 
There they don't catch them, you know ; they kill them 1 " 



156 Our Common Speech. 

unprejudiced. The other hopeful considera- 
tion is that the historian Prescott, tolerably 
good authority on the use of English, regarded 
the style of the author of '^ Edgar Huntly'' as 
characterized by '^ unnatural condensation, 
unusual and pedantic epithets and elliptical 
forms of expression, /;/ perpetual violation of 
idiom;'' it is just possible, therefore, that Dr. 
Hall, with all his acquirements in scientific 
linguistics, may not know quite as much as he 
supposes he does about the correct use of our 
(more or less) Anglo-Saxon vernacular. 

At the same time, the occasional appear- 
ance in England of an article like those from 
which are taken the elegant extracts in the last 
paragraph but one, is a phenomenon which 
suggests two interesting reflections. The first, 
of comparatively minor importance, is merely 
that some of our English cousins have a good 
deal yet to learn about our common language 
as used in the two countries. The second is, 
that where there is so much smoke there must 
be some flame. That is, making all allow- 
ances, there must really exist certain noticeable 
variations between the styles of writing and 



American English. 157 

speaking that are current on the opposite sides 
of the Atlantic ; for if no differences at all 
could be found, it is hardly probable that any 
intelligent man, however strongly British his 
prepossessions, would care to publish a disser- 
tation in which our practice is deliberately set 
down as distinctly inferior to that of his own 
nation. In what these differences consist, and 
in what particulars the mother tongue may be 
thought to have become especially *' depraved" 
in this country, are questions deserving atten- 
tion. 

I. 

In the first place, it will hardly be denied in 
any quarter that the speech of the United 
States is quite unlike that of Great Britain in 
the important particular that we have no dia- 
lects, ** I never found any difficulty in under- 
standing an American speaker," writes the his- 
torian Freeman;^ ''but I have often found it 

1 Article, " Some Impressions of the United States," pub- 
lished in the Fortnightly Review, and copied into the 
Eclectic for October, 1882, p. 435, and Littell for September 
9, 1882, No. 1994, p. 602. 



158 Our Common Speech. 

difficult to understand a Northern-English 
speaker." ''From Portland, Me., to Portland, 
Oregon," says a writer in the Westminster 
Review (July, 1888, p. 35), ''no trace of a dis- 
tinct dialect is to be found. The man from 
Maine, even though he may be of inferior 
education and limited capacity, can completely 
understand the man of Oregon. There is no 
peasant with a patois ; there is no rough North- 
umbrian burr; in point of fact, there is no 
brogue." Trifling variations in pronunciation, 
and in the use of a few particular words, cer- 
tainly exist. The Yankee " expects " or " cal- 
culates," while the Virginian *' reckons;" the 
illiterate Northerner " claims," ^ and the South- 
erner of similar class, by a very curious 
reversal of the blunder, " allows," what better 
educated people merely assert. The pails and 
pans of the world at large become " buckets ** 
when taken to Kentucky. It is " evening " in 

1 And sometimes, alas ! the Northerner who is not illiter- 
ate. Prof. Whitney, editor of the great Century Dictionary, 
is more than once guilty of this solecism in his " Elements of 
English Pronunciation ; " and so is Prof. L. T. Townsend of 
the Boston University, in his work on the " Art of Speech," 
published by the Appletons in 188 1. 



American English. 159 

Richmond while afternoon still lingers a hun- 
dred miles due north at Washington. Vessels 
go into 'Mocks" on their arrival at Philadel- 
phia, but into *' slips " at Mobile ; they are 
tied up to '' wharves'* at Boston, but to '* piers '' 
at Milwaukee. Distances from place to place 
are measured by '^ squares " in Baltimore, by 
*' blocks" in Chicago. The '* shilling" of New 
York is the *'levy" of Pennsylvania, the '' bit" 
of San Francisco, the '^ ninepence " of old 
New England, and the ^'escalan" of New 
Orleans. But put all these variations together, 
with such others as more microscopic examina- 
tion might reveal, and how far short they fall 
of representing anything like the real dialectic 
differences of speech that obtain, and always 
have obtained, not only as between the three 
kingdoms, but even between contiguous sec- 
tions of England itself! What great city of 
this country, for example, has developed, or is 
likely to develop, any peculiar class of errors 
at all comparable in importance to those of 
the cockney speech of London? What two 
regions can be found within our borders, how- 
ever sequestered and unenlightened, and however 



i6o Our Common Speech. 

widely separated by geographical position, of 
which the speech of the one presents any 
difficulty worth mentioning, or even any very 
startling unfamiliarity in sound or construction, 
to the inhabitant of the other? Our omnipre- 
sent railroads, telegraph lines, mail routes and 
printing presses, and the well-marked disposi- 
tion of every class of our people to make 
lavish use of these means of intercommunica- 
tion, both for the rapid diffusion of intelligence 
and the interchange of opinion, and also, so 
far as lines of travel are concerned, for the 
frequent transportation of the people them- 
selves hither and thither, with a degree of ease 
and celerity to which no other country has 
ever attained — these causes have always fa- 
vored, and seem likely permanently to preserve, 
a certain community of expression as well as 
of thought, that is not only practically prohibi- 
tive of the formation of new dialects, but also 
rapidly effaces the prominent lineaments of 
such variations as have at different times been 
imported from the old world. If then, in this 
particular respect, we are depraving our mother 
tongue, the only logical inference that can be 



American English. i6i 

drawn is that a language reaches its best 
estate in proportion as it is diversified by local 
peculiarities. 

It ought to be remembered also, in this 
immediate connection, that the ordinary speech 
of the United States presents not greatly more 
of what may be called caste variations than of 
those that are attributable to differences of 
locality. A discriminating English traveler, 
the Rev. F. Barham Zincke, Vicar of VVherstead 
and Chaplain-in-Ordinary to the Queen, has 
mentioned as '' a remarkable fact that the Eng- 
lish spoken in America is not only very pure, 
but also is spoken with equal purity by all 
classes. * * The language in every man's 
mouth," he adds, ** is that of literature and 
society. * * It is even the language of the 
negroes of the towns.'' ^ In other words, the 
speech of the lower orders of our people, even 
down to the very substrata, whether examined 
in regard to its vocabulary, its construction or 
its pronunciation, differs from what all admit 
to be standard correctness in a much smaller 

1 '' Last Winter in the United States ; " John Murray, Lon- 
don, 1863. 

II 



i62 Our Common Speech. 

degree than we have every reason to beheve 
to be the case in England, our enemies them- 
selves being judges. A careful comparison 
of slang dictionaries, I think, will reveal a far 
longer list of unauthorized words as current 
among British thieves and '' cadgers " than 
among their congeners in the United States. 
Grammatical rules are violated badly enough 
by the ignorant of our own cities every day, 
no doubt; but how often, after all, will you 
hear from intelligent and respectable working 
people of American descent quite such a sole- 
cism as the '' I were '' and *' he were " that are so 
frequently noticed in the mouths of lower- 
middle-class Britons, accustomed all their lives 
to conversation with speakers of the purest 
English? And as for pronunciation, we have 
our faults, of course, in abundance, the best of 
us as well as the most careless, and should 
amend them with all diligence; but where, 
from the Atlantic to the Pacific, will you dis- 
cover any such utter disability of hearing or 
discernment as can permit men to drop or 
multiply their k's or transpose their w's and 



American English. 163 



II. 

Speaking of pronunciation, and with regard 
to the sound of the language as used by the 
educated people of the two countries (a point 
which most writers on Americanisms pass over 
with the briefest notice, though one of the 
ablest of them all, Prof. George P. Marsh, has 
devoted to it his chief attention), it must be 
admitted, I think, that if the typical English 
intonation is better than ours, it is because the 
office of language is what Talleyrand said it 
was — to conceal one's thought. That is to 
say, the average American college graduate, 
for instance, will speak more intelligibly and 
more agreeably wherever there is any difficulty 
in speaking, as before a large assembly or in 
the open air, than will the English university 
man. The Yankee may talk through his nose, 
to be sure ; may unduly emphasize minor 
words, cut off terminal letters rather abruptly, 
or select too high a key; but he will not say 
readiuy writing speakin' ; he will not gulp or 
sputter; he will seldom insert superfluous aws 



164 Our Common Speech. 

or 7/g/ts, and the reporter who may have to 
follow his utterance will be far less liable to 
lose parts of a sentence, or to mistake one 
phrase for another, than in discharging the 
same duty on the other side. 

And when it comes to orthoepy proper, the 
deliberate sounding of single words, it will be 
found that in almost every case the difference 
is due to the American's following more closely 
than does the Briton the spelling of the word — 
a practice which can hardly result in depraving 
the language, but seems rather to suggest that 
the American is the greater reader of the two, 
and therefore likely to be the safer guide in 
questions of verbal correctness. Thus the now 
thoroughly anglicized French word trait, in 
which none of us ever thinks of dropping the 
final /, is still commonly called tray in England, 
and that pronunciation is given the place of 
honor in the best British authority, Stormonth's 
excellent dictionary. The / of ahnondy com- 
monly sounded in this country, is silent abroad. 
Sliver, which Americans call sliver, following 
the obvious analogy of the more common word 
liver, and following, too, the example of the 



American English. 165 

poet Chaucer, is largely called silver in Great 
Britain. Schedule^ which we invariably pro- 
nounce skedule^ constitutes in England almost 
the only exception to the rule that ch is hard 
after initial s^ being there called sJicdule or 
sedule. The verb to perfecty invariably pro- 
nounced like the adjective in England, with 
accent on the first syllable, is very often heard 
as ^^rfecf in this country, thus bringing it into 
harmony with perfume^ cement, desert, present, 
produce, progress, project, rebel, record and other 
words which are accented on the final syllable 
when used as verbs, but not otherwise. Nephew 
and phial, which constitute in England the only 
exceptions to the almost universal law that 
the digraph ph, when sounded at all, is sounded 
like /, are both reduced to rule in this country, 
by pronouncing the first nefew and spelling the 
second vial. Hostler, always pronounced in 
this country as it is spelled, is marked 'ostler 
in Stormonth. 

And in respect to geographical names, the 
closer adherence of our countrymen to the 
guidance of the orthography is, of course, 
notorious and manifest. Except the dropping, 



1 66 Our Common Speech. 

in imitation of the French, of the final s of 
Illinois; the two words Connecticut and Ar- 
kansas (the latter a very doubtful exception) ; 
and a few terms like Sioux, derived from cor- 
ruptions of Indian names — it is not easy to 
recall any geographical appellation indigenous 
to our soil which is not pronounced very 
nearly as it is spelled. And when names are 
imported with a well-authorized divergence 
between the sound and the spelling, a strong 
tendency toward the obliteration of this diver- 
gence is sure to become manifest. Warwick 
is about as often Warwick as Warwick when 
spoken of in America; Norwich is more com- 
monly Norwich, I think, than Noridge ; St. Louis 
and Louisville are often called St. Lewis and 
Lewisville ; a resident of Delaware County in 
New York would not know what place was 
meant if you spoke of the county seat as 
** Daily," so perfectly settled is ** Delhi '' as 
the pronunciation as well as the spelling of the 
name. A multitude of other instances might 
be mentioned, among the most remarkable of 
which, perhaps, is the change that has taken 
place in the popular sounding of the name 



American English. 167 

Chautauqua. As long as it was spelled with a 
final e^ people persisted in saying Chautawk, 
notwithstanding that the local practice was 
always otherwise; but an immediate reforma- 
tion was effected, some thirty years ago, by 
the simple expedient of substituting an a. It 
is probably quite safe to say that no mispro- 
nunciation of a geographical name, growing 
out of an attempt to follow too closely the 
sound of its letters, has ever become so prev- 
alent in Great Britain as even to suggest the 
idea of making the spelling conform to the 
orthoepy, and, furthermore, that if such a 
difficulty ocurred, the attempted remedy in 
question would be found in that country quite 
unproductive of any change in the popular 



III. 

Passing from orthoepy to orthography, it 
hardly need be said that in every instance 
without exception where a change in spelling 
has originated in the United States, the change 
has been in the direction of simplicity, and in 
the interest therefore of the *' reform ** w^hich 



i68 Our Common Speech. 

the Philological Society of Great Britain (not 
to mention such individual names as Max 
Miiller, Dr. J. A. H. Murray, Prof. Newman, 
the Duke of Richmond, and Mr. Gladstone) 
so warmly favors. The dropping of the second 
g in waggon, the u in parlour and similar 
words, the me in progra7nnie (who would think 
of writting diagramme or telegramme .^), the 
e in storey (of a house), and the final e m pease^ 
(plural of pea), are all changes in this direc- 
tion ; and so is the substitution of w for ttgh in 
plough, and fiox ugh in draught, and the aban- 
donment of the spellings cheque, shew, cyder, ^ 
and especially gaol, the universal adoption of 
Jail bringing this word into harmony with the 
rest of the language, as there is no other in- 
stance in English of a soft g before a — not- 
withstanding that some absurd people, who do 
not call Margaret Marjaret or Garfield Jarjield, 
will persist in saying oleomarjarine. 

It should be noted, moreover, that our 
American practice of dropping the m from 

* Of course pease was not originally a plural word, but no- 
body thinks of it otherwise now. 

2 See Halliwell's Dictionary, art. " Griggles." 



American English. 169 

many words formerly ending in our is more 
than a movement in the direction of spelling 
reform, for it cancels the etymological misinfor- 
mation suggested by the old-fashioned orthog- 
raphy not yet extinct in England. Some 
people imagine that the u in these words has 
value, or at least a certain sort of interest, as 
indicating that they came to us through the 
French and not directly from Latin or from 
other tongues, — rather an unimportant matter at 
best; but the trouble is that, with the exception 
perhaps of one single word, savour, the indica- 
tion either points the wrong way or would 
almost certainly be overlooked except by per- 
sons familiar with entirely obsolete spellings in 
French. The u is omitted, even in England, from 
governor, emperor, senator, error, ancestor, am- 
bassador, progenitor, successor, m^etaphor, bachelor, 
exterior^ inferior and superior, every one of 
which is of French origin, while it is used in 
neighbor, flavor, harbor and arbor, which are not 
French. Even in honor, favor, labor, armor, 
odor, vapor, savior and parlor, where the m has 
some color of right to be found, it is doubtful 
whether its insertion has value as suggesting 



lyo Our Common Speech. 

French derivation, for in the case of the first 
six of these words the ordinary reader would be 
quite certain to have in mind only the modern 
spellings — honneur^ faveur^ labeitVy ar7mire, 
odeur and vapeur — which have the u indeed, 
but no ; while savior and parlor come from 
old French words that are themselves without 
the u — saveor and pa^deor. The u in all these 
words is therefore either useless or positively 
misleading. And finally, in the case of color^ 
humor and valor, it is to be remarked that the 
exact American orthography actually occurs in 
old French. 

IV. 

In respect to at least one Yankee spelling, 
that o{ plow, and probably others, it should not 
be forgotten that the prevalent practice in this 
country agrees with the universal custom of an 
earlier time, from which divergence without 
good reason has gradually grown up in England. 
And this brings us to another strongly marked 
characteristic of our American speech — its 
greater permanence and steadiness, so to speak, 
as compared with that of the mother country. 



American English. 171 

This pecuHarity will appear very clearly, where 
it might least be expected, on close examina- 
tion of any list of words supposed to have 
been greatly distorted in their meaning, or even 
manufactured out of whole cloth, by erring 
Yankees, a very large proportion of v/hich will 
almost always be found to be good old English, 
grown obsolescent or obsolete at home, but 
preserved in the New World in their pristine 
vitality and force ; and conversely, on examin- 
ing such a book as Halliwell's Dictionary of 
Archaisms and Provincialisms, which contains, 
presumably, no word now in good use in Great 
Britain in the meaning given, the American 
reader will discover a great number of terms — 
nearly three hundred, I should say — with which 
he is perfectly familiar. I give a few examples, 
not including any that are marked as provincial, 
the implication being that all these words were 
once good English, but are no longer in com- 
mon use in the mother country: 

Adze (a carpenter's tool); affectation (^'a 
curious desire for a thing which nature hath 
not given"); afterclap ; agape; age diS a verb; 
^/r in the sense of appearance; amerce; audi- 



172 Our Common Speech. 

rons ; angry ^ said of a wound; appellant (one 
who appeals) ; apple-pie order ; baker s dozen ; 
bamboozle ; bay in a barn ; bay window ; bearers 
at a funeral; berate ; between whiles ; bicker; 
blanch (to whiten) ; brain as a verb ; burly ; cast 
(to tie and throw down, as a horse); catcall; 
cesspool; chafe (to grow angry); clodhopper; 
clutch (to seize) ; clutter ; cockerel ; coddle; copi- 
ous ; cosey ; counterfeit money; ^r^^in the sense 
of dilapidated, as applied to a building ; crock (an 
earthen vessel) ; crone (an old woman) ; c7'ook (a 
bend) ; croon ; cross-grained in the sense of ob- 
stinate or peevish; cross-patch; cross purposes ; 
cuddle ; cuff (to beat); deft; din ; dormer wm- 
dow; earnest, money given to bind a bargain; 
• ^^S" ^^^ y greenhorn ; hasp ; jack of all trades ; 
jamb of a door; lintel ; list (selvage of cloth); 
loop hole; nettled (out of temper); newel ; or- 
nate ; perforce; piping hot ; pit (mark left by 
small-pox) ; quail (to shrink) ; ragamuffi7i ; 
riffraff; rigmarole; scant; seedy (*' miserable 
looking *') ; shingles ; sorrel (the color) ; out of 
sorts ; stale ('' wanting freshness ") ; sutler ; 
thill; toady ; trash; underpinning. All these 
w^ords, with many others equally familiar in the 



American English. 173 

United States, are apparently regarded by Hal- 
liwell as having become obsolete in England. 

It would not be difficult, on the other hand, 
to compile quite a list of Briticisms, including 
words recently invented in Great Britain (where 
the '* boldness of innovation on this subject," 
amounting to *^ absolute licentiousness," which 
Noah Webster notes and deplores in his pre- 
face of 1847, still runs rampant) — such as 
totalling, or (still worse) totting, for adding up; 
navvy, for laborer; fad^ for hobby; randomly, 
for at random ; outing, for pleasure excursion ; 
tund, for beat^;- binnper, for enormous^; picked 
for aborted ^ ; and a larger class of old words 
now used in that country in a comparatively new 
and in some respects objectionable signification 
not generally recognized in the United States. 

I remember hearing with astonishment, some 
twenty years ago, from an English gentleman of 

1 Even Spencer condescends to the use of this extraordi- 
nary vocable, though he offers a sort of semi-apology by put- 
ting it in quotation marks. — Study of Sociology, chap. 8. 

2 '' The bumper v^heat crop now expected by American agri- 
culturists." — Editorial in Mark Lane Express, June i, 1891. 

^ " Mr, Buchanan's mare Maggie has picked twin foals." — 
North British Agriculturist, April 30, 1890. 



174 Our Common Speech. 

culture and high social standing, that it was 
necessary to remove the gates of Quebec, ** to 
give more room for traffic^ I asked no ques- 
tions, but wondered inwardly whether the people 
of the American Gibraltar were in the habit, like 
the ancient Orientals, of resorting to the gates 
of the town to exchange commodities with each 
other. On our arrival next morning, the mys- 
tery was solved ; it was travel, not barter, that 
my friend meant by traffic. The word is con- 
tinually thus misused in England, and it must 
be sorrowfully admitted that the bad habit is 
now invading this country as well, not so much 
among the people, however, as in a kind of 
technical way. The New-York Central Rail- 
road, for instance, has a '* general traffic man- 
ager,'' who certainly manages no traffic, the 
corporation being carriers and not traders. 

Other examples — as yet, happily, not natu- 
ralized in American usage — are : Knocked-upy 
for fatigued ; Famous for excellent — '' we have 
had a famous walk," meaning an enjoyable one; 
bargain, for haggle ^ — *' Mr. Boffin, I never 

1 The anonymous author of Chatto and V^indus* Slang 
Dictionary (new edition, London, 1874) falls into this error, 



American English. 175 

bargain," says Silas VVegg in Our Mutual Friend 
(book I, chap. 5) — he was bargaining at that 
very moment ; tiresome^ for disagreeable ; the 
particularly refined and elegant expression roty 
for nonsense ; //iJ^, for pitcher; good form, for in 
good taste ; trap, for carriage ; tub, for bathe ; to 
wire, for to telegraph; starved, for frozen; stop, 
for stay — '* no paint will stop on them," says 
the heroine of Wilkie Collins' '* No Name ; " as- 
sist, for be present, as the silent auditors at a 
concert are absurdly said to " assist " at it ; 
plant for fixtures, as the ** plant" of a railway or 
a factory; intijnate, for announce — advertisers 
in British newspapers continually '^ intimate " to 
their customers that they have changed their 
their quarters or received new goods ; caucus — 
** grotesquely misapplied " in England, says the 
highest British authority, Murray's Philological 
Dictionary, '' to an organization or system" ; 
and tidy, for almost anything complimentary — 
a London paper made mention the other day of 
** a very tidy bull," the writer meaning a valu- 
able animal, and by no means intending to 

which surely ought not to be expected of a lexicographer. 
See page 353 of the work referred to. 



176 Our Common Speech. 

refer to any particular cleanliness in the beast's 
personal habits. English hostlers also — to get 
pretty well down in the social scale, though by 
no means going as low as do the compilers of 
what are termed Americanisms, in their search 
for blunders — English hostlers sometimes speak 
of cliilling cold water, meaning warming it, an 
extraordinary perversion of a very common and 
elementary word. 

It is not only, however, in their recent coin- 
ages and anomalous assigning of new meanings 
to old terms, that the English have made reck- 
less changes in the body of our speech where 
the American practice adheres to the former 
standard. They have swung off in the opposite 
direction also, curtailing to no good purpose the 
significance of several words. A '' young per- 
son," is alwa3^s a girl in England, the term being 
never applied to a boy. An invalid is '' ill," not 
sick, unless he happens to be nauseated, while 
at the same time, strangely enough, it is re- 
garded as perfectly proper to describe him as 
confined to a sick-room or stretched upon a 
sick-bed, and the English prayer-book not only 
contains services for the ** visitation of the sick " 



American English. 177 

and the ** communion of the sick," but requires 
those who use it to make intercession for ** all 
sick persons " as often as the Litany is read. A 
latter-day Briton — notwithstanding an exam- 
ple so recent as Macaulay, ** the richest in- 
habitants exhibited their wealth, not by riding 
in carriages " — is horrified at the idea of riding 
in anything built on the coach plan, though he 
makes no scruple of riding in an omnibus or a 
street-car; when you enter the vehicle at the 
side, you drive ; when at the end, you ride. A 
beast, moreover, is now in Great Britain a mem- 
ber of the genus bos, and almost always an 
animal that is to be fed for beef, at that ; English 
official market reports give prices for '' beasts,*' 
** sheep," '' calves," *' pigs," and ** milch cows '' ; 
and I read not long ago in a Dublin newspaper, 
speaking of rabies, that *' two dogs, five beasts^ 
one pig and one horse were killed during the 
week." If the author of '* Macleod of Dare " is a 
trustworthy guide, the word tip, used in reference 
to a journey in Great Britain, indicates, not that 
the traveller is seeking a more elevated region or 
moving northwardly, but solely that he is going 
toward the capital ; '' up to London " and '* down 

12 



178 Our Common Speech. 

to the Highlands " are, it appears, the correct 
formulae. No wonder the young Scotchman 
thought it sounded *' stupid/' Fancy a man in 
Chicago saying that he was going ** up to 
Washington," or a man in Washington speaking 
of events occurring '* down in St. Paul ! " 

A third kind of variation that seems to have 
grown up in Great Britain to a greater degree 
than in this country, is the habit of turning 
active and especially reflexive verbs into neu- 
ters by dropping the object, as, " Don't trouble " 
for " Don't trouble yourself." ^ It is true that a 
tendency in this direction can be traced a long 
way back in the history of the language. To 
repent y to endeavor^ and some other now neuter 
verbs, were formerly reflexives; ox\^ endeavored 
himself in the same sense that we now apply 
ourselves^ and repented himself ^.'s^ we noy^ bet hi?tk 
ourselves. It is also true that a few alterations 
of this kind not yet sanctioned by good usage, 
but occasionally heard, may be said properly 
enough to be common to the two countries ; ** I 
avail of this opportunity," for *' I avail myself of 

1 " We do not trouble to inquire." — London Law TimeSy 
quoted in Albany Law Journal j vol. 26, p. 121. 



American English. 179 

this opportunity/' is one. But I think any care- 
ful reader of the now current literature of 
England and the United States will approve 
the opinion that our British brethren are going 
much faster in this direction than are we. As 
long ago as 1854 Miss Yonge wrote (in Hearts- 
ease, part II, chapter 10): ** Theodora flung 
away and was rushing off.'* Charles Reade, 
whom the astute Fitzedward Hall ranks among 
** the choicest of living English writers," ^ is 
guilty of such phrases as *' Wardlaw whipped 
before him " (Foul Play, chap. 15), '' Ransome 
whipped before it " (Put Yourself in his Place, 
chapter 31), [Little] ** flung out of the room " 
(same, chapter 32), and various others. These 
and similar incomplete sentences, not at all 
uncommon in British books and periodicals, 
certainly strike the American ear as decided 
innovations, and constitute a peculiarity of dic- 
tion very rarely to be observed on this side of 
the water. 

The English have also a practice, more pro- 
nounced by far than our own, of abbreviating a 
good many words in their common talk. They 
1 Scribner's Monthly, vol. 3, p. 701. 



i8o Our Common Speech. 

never call their consolidated government bonds 
anything but *' consols/' or the process of hypo- 
thecation anything but *' hypothec." The Zoo- 
logical Gardens in London are commonly known 
as the ^* Zoo," and a series of delightful popular 
concerts given every season in the same city are 
euphoniously denominated the *' Monday pops.** 
Hampshire, not in writing only, but in speech 
as well, is *^ Hants," Buckinghamshire is *^ Bucks," 
and Hertfordshire ** Herts." A public house is 
a ^' public." A similar liberty is taken with the 
names of firms ; *' Smith & Co. " is often made to 
do duty, even in formal business letters, for the 
established title, *' Smith, Brown & Robinson." 
One well known American publishing house, 
Messrs. Ticknor & Fields of Boston, did at one 
time imitate this form of contraction, by gilding 
" Ticknor & Co." on the backs of their books ; 
but the practice has been abandoned by their 
successors, and I do not know that any other 
American house ever followed the example. 
Certain it is that about the longest and most 
awkward name in the book trade *^ Cassell, 
Fetter, Galpin & Co.," was always written in full 
in this country, though often contracted (be- 



American English. i8i 

fore it was changed) into Cassell & Co., in 
England. 

In the construction of many sentences, how- 
ever, an opposite plan is frequently followed — 
the insertion of utterly superfluous words. So 
important a writer as Henry J. NicoU says — • 
** Landmarks of English Literature," introduc- 
tion, p. 1 8 — *^ Every critic occasionally meets 
in with works of great fame of which he cannot 
appreciate the merit" Beaconsfield writes — 
** Endymion," chap. lOo: ^* He was by way of 
intimating that he was engaged in a great 
work." So a writer in Cassell's Magazine, Feb- 
ruary, 1893, p. 123 : "' She was by way of paint- 
ing the shrimp girl." In Herbert Spencer's 
Treatise on Education, chap. 10, we read that '' in 
Russia the infant mortality is somethmg enor- 
mous," and in one of Charles Dickens' letters to 
Mr. Forster: ** The daily difference in [a ship's] 
rolling, as she burns the coals out, is something 
absolutely fearful." ^ It hardly need be re- 
marked that the italicized words in all these 
sentences have to be removed before they be- 

1 "A Short Life of Charles Dickens," Appletons' Handy 
Volume Series, p. 116. 



i82 Our Common Speech. 

come intelligible, or at least agreeable to per- 
sons appreciating really correct speech. The 
peculiar misuse of the affix cver^ as in saying 
'' \\A\dXever are you doing?" that one so often 
notices in the conv^ersation particularly of English 
ladies, is another instance of the same failing; 
and who has not been annoyed and disgusted 
by the innumerable gofs with which so many 
English pages fairly bristle? Three good illus- 
trations occur in a single article, *' A Few Words 
about the Nineteenth Century," by Frederic 
Harrison, in the Fortnightly Review^: *' He ex- 
tolled him for possessing all the good qualities 
which he had not got ;'' '' for twenty thousand 
years man has got no better light than what w^as 
given by pitch, tallow or oil ; " ''I don't say 
but what this w^ork has got to be done." Or 
glance over Endymion : " He has got a cham- 
pion " (chap. 35) ; '* I \\d,Y^ got some House of 
Commons men dining with me" (chap. 50); 
*^ I have got a horse which I should like you to 
ride" (chap. 52); *' Lady Montford maintained 
they had got nothing " {id?) ; *' All you have got 
to do is to make up your mind " (chap. 65); 
** You have got a great deal of private business 



I 



American English. 183 

to attend to " (chap. 99). So the Marquis of 
Blandford, in the North American Review: 
** The Irish members are a feature which we 
have not at present ^^/ to deal with; " Spencer 
in the book above referred to (Education, chap. 
3) : *^ Must not the child judge by such evidence 
as he has^<?/.^'' George Augustus Sala, Illus- 
trated London News : ** To my shame, I have 
not got a Cowden-Clarke's concordance ; '' Wil- 
kie Collins, Man and Wife, chap. 9: ** I have 
got a letter for you ; " and in Marion Fay, chap. 
3 : *' * He has got money; ' * but he is not there- 
fore to be a tyrant ; ' ' Yes, he is, over a daugh- 
ter who has got none ; ' '' Charles Reade, Foul 
Play, chap. 19: ''I have got something for 
you " — in none of which cases is the idea of 
getting intended in the slightest degree to be 
implied, but only that of present possession. 
The general American dislike of this ugly word, 
and our practice, where the past participle of the 
verb get must be used, of adopting the old and 
softer form gotten (which is now scarcely ever 
used in England) ^ are not exactly what would 

1 See "English and American English," by R. A. Proctor, 
in the Gentleman's Magazine, copied into Appletons' Journal 



184 Our Common Speech. 

be expected of a people who are ruining the 
language. 

V. 

I think moreover, though the opinion is of 
course only an opinion, and hardly susceptible 
of positive proof or absolute negation, that good 
English authors in general are less particular 
about many points of grammar than are Ameri- 
cans of the same class. Dean Alford is author- 
ity for the statement that '* our best writers 
[meaning the best British writers] have the pop- 
ular expression these kind^ those sorty' ^ where 
this kind or that sort is intended ; and I have 
noticed intances of this solecism in Bagehot 
(Physics and Politics, No. II, section 3 — ''Na- 
tions with these sort of maxims '*) and in Miss 
Muloch (Agatha s Husband, chap, i — '' The 
lansons were those sort of religious people who 
think any Biblical allusions irreverent") In a 
story called '' The Ladies Lindores," published 
serially in Blackwood (part II, chap. 4, No. 

for October, 1881, and the New York Tribune of Aug. 14, 
1881. 
1 The Queen's English, nth thousand, IT 98. 



i 



American English. 185 

799 of the magazine,) we find the following: 
" There are some happy writers whose mission 
it is to expound the manners and customs of 
the great. * * And yet, alas ! to these writers 
when they have done all, yet must we add that 
they fail to satisfy their models. * * * As if 
these sort of people knew anything about 
society ! * Lady Adeliza says.'* Lady Adeliza, 
or her reporter, would do well to study a certain 
very elementary rule of grammar. 

A writer in the Gentleman's Magazine, Mr. 
Dudley Errington (see Littell's Living Age, No. 
2038, p. 95), makes the following statement, re- 
ferring to Great Britain only: '' The fact is that 
bade and dursty and even dares, have become all 
but obsolete in our day, without any possible 
reason either in grammar or in euphony. Why, 
for instance, should not bade or bidden be used 
in the following instances from the Times and 
the Quarterly Review? * Mr. Charles Dickens 
finally bid farewell to Philadelphia.* — Times. 
* Uncertain even at that epoch (1864) of Aus- 
tria's fidelity, Prussia bid high for German 
leadership.' — Times. * He called his servants 
and bid them procure firearms.* — Times. * The 



1 86 Our Common Speech. 

competition is so sharp and general that the 
leader of to-day can never be sure that he will 
not be outbid to-morrow/ — Quarterly Review. 
And why not durst in the following extract 
from the Rev. Charles Kingsley? ' Neither her 
maidens nor the priest dare speak to her for 
half an hour/ — * Herewai'd the Wake! '* 

In the third series of Freeman's historical 
essays we find gems like the following: '* One 
whom the mockers of the age said was no fitting 
guest; " '* It may be argued that if he either 
could not nor^NOv^(^ not hold Athens; '* ** The 
valiant peasantry of old Hellas was of another 
vciovXdi fro7n the nobles; " and '* Their relation to 
the empire was wholly different to that of the 
lUyrian slaves." 

Worse than most of these slips is Charles 
Readers not infrequent blundering with the 
nominative and objective cases, as where he 
makes the highborn and elegant Edward Foun- 
tain, Esq., of Font Abbey, inform his niece that 
'* there will be only us two at dinner ! " (Love 
me Little, Love me Long, chap, i.) Worse 
still is the confusing of the verbs lie and lay, an 
error very rarely to be observed in respectable 



American English. 187 

American society, but one to which Alford says 
Eton graduates are especially prone, and one 
into which Anthony Trollope fell when he made 
Mr. Harding (in '' The Warden,'' chap. 7) 
say: *' I have done more than sleep upon it; 
I have laid awake upon it." A striking in- 
stance of the occurrence of this confusion may 
be found in an extraordinary place for a gram- 
matical error, Stormonth's English Word-Book, 
where /aid is actually given as the participle of 
/ie/ After noting this, one need hardly be sur- 
prised to find the same writer defining Alborak 
(in the supplement to his dictionary) as ^' the 
white mule on which Mohammed is said to have 
rode from Jerusalem to heaven ! " If an Ameri- 
can lexicographer were caught using laid for 
laiuy or rode for ridden^ what a text it would 
furnish for a dissertation on the process of de- 
praving our mother tongue which is advancing 
with such alarming rapidity in the United 
States ! 

About as bad as this, perhaps, is the remark- 
able phrase ^^ a good feiv'' that one sometimes 
sees in very respectable British publications — 
not exactly ungrammatical, of course, but funny, 



1 88 Our Common Speech. 

so to speak. A British practice Ihat manifestly 
is ungrammatical, and so extremely ungramma- 
tical as to evince ignorance or disregard of one 
of the simplest principles of the structure of our 
language, is exemplified in such phrases as 
** an inventioni" exhibition/' *' the rivers pollu- 
tion commission " and the like. Nobody speaks 
of a hatjT rack, or a booki" case or a cloaks room, 
and everybody ought to know that a noun used 
to qualify another noun is for the time an adjec- 
tive a7id therefore absolutely indeclinable ; but 
while this is perfectly recognized in England in 
the case of every old combination, it is repeat- 
edly overlooked in making new ones — and 
overlooked in the most formal official docu- 
ments even more than in the careless language 
of the newspapers, where it would be perhaps 
more pardonable. 

Then there are certain highly incorrect con- 
structions, like ** different to,'' and ** frightened 
of," which are notoriously British, and of which 
it is almost safe to say that no American is ever 
guilty. Spencer's " immediately this is recog- 
nized " (Study of Sociology, chap. 2), meaning 
as soon as this is recognizedy and Buckle's 



American English. 189 

" directly they came " (letter to Mrs. Grey, 
quoted in Huth's Life, chap. 2) meaning directly 
after they had cojne^ are other instances. Buckle, 
it should be remembered, was anything but a 
careless writer, having devoted great labor for 
a long time to the acquisition of a correct 
and polished style of composition. One tvould 
think he need not have spent many hours in 
this sort of study before discovering that such 
a sentence as ** I put them away directly they 
came " is not English. (Since writing the last 
sentence, I have noticed, with sorrow, an in- 
stance of exactly the same error in one of G. 
W. Smalley's letters from London to the New 
York Tribune : *^ Directly he heard of the in- 
tended demonstration, Mr. Parnell left the train." 
But Mr. Smalley, like the lady in '' The Mighty 
Dollar," has '* lived so much abroad, you know," 
that some absorption of British blunders might 
well be expected of him ; and I think one 
might spend a good deal of time in searching 
American literature, periodical or book, before 
he would find another case.) 

Dr. Fitzedward Hall, as already quoted, is of 
opinion that educated people in this country 



190 Our Common Speech. 

have lost the ability to write our language as 
did the author of *' Edgar Huntly " at the 
close of the last century. But what must he 
think of the improvement that has been made 
on the other side of the sea when he turns the 
pages of Endymion and notices the following, 
among other phrases of similar correctness and 
beauty? ''Everybody says what i/uy like" 
(chap. 20); "I would never leave him for a 
moment, only I know he would get wearied of 
me " (chap. 39) ; ** I have never been back to 
the old place" (chap. 6^)\ " Everybody can do 
exactly what t/iey like " (chap. 98). Speaking 
in all seriousness, were it not on the whole 
preferable that the art of writing English should 
decline everywhere even faster than it has de- 
clined in this country, rather than that it should 
develop into such perfection as is illustrated by 
the last literary production of an ex-prime- 
minister of Great Britain? 



VI. 



Of course nobody thinks of denying, never- 
theless, that a number of new, and in many 



American English. 191 

cases uncalled-for, words and expressions have 
been invented and now pass current in the 
United States, or that the meaning of some 
others has been gradually warped, to the injury 
of the language, just as has occurred in England. 
This part of the subject has been laboriously 
investigated by several diligent students — so 
laboriously that there is little left to say about 
it except in the way of correction. Not to 
speak of articles in periodicals, brief essays, 
and single chapters, no fewer than seven books 
devoted entirely to so-called Americanisms in 
speech have from time to time appeared — 
Pickering's Vocabulary, in 18 16; Noah Web- 
ster's ** Letter,'* in 1817; Elwyn's Glossary, in 
1859; Scheie de Vere's Americanisms, in 1872; 
Bartlett's Dictionary, — the first edition in 1848, 
the second in 1859, ^1^^ third in i860, the fourth, 
considerably enlarged, in 1877; Farmer's Amer- 
icanisms, in 1889 y ^^^^ Norton's Political Ameri- 
canisms, in 1890. The student of language will 
find much to interest, and not a little to amuse 
him, in each of these collections of monstrosities. 



192 Our Common Speech. 



VII. 

John Pickering's *' Vocabulary, or Col- 
lection OF Words and Phrases which have 
been supposed to be peculiar to the United 
States," originated in the author's practice, 
while living in London during the first two 
years of this century, of noting down, for the 
purpose of avoiding them, such of his own 
verbal expressions as were condemned for 
American errors by his British friends. After 
returning to this country, he communicated a 
paper on the subject, consisting of an essay and 
a list of words, to the American Academy of 
Arts and Sciences, and shortly after, having 
largely amplified the vocabulary, submitted the 
whole to the candor of his countrymen for their 
instruction and admonition. The poor man was 
deeply concerned for the future of the language 
in America, and very much in earnest in his 
work. It might indeed be a long time, he 
thought, before it should ** be the lot of many 
Americans to publish works which will be read 
out of their own country ; yet all who have the 



American English. 1^3 

least tincture of learning will continue to feel 
an ardent desire to acquaint themselves with 
English authors. Let us then," he proceeds, 
** imagine the time to have arrived when Ameri- 
cans shall no longer be able to understand the 
works of Milton, Pope, Swift, Addison and other 
English authors justly styled classic without the 
aid of a translation into a language that is to be 
called at some future day the American tongue ! 
* * * Nor is this the only view in which a 
radical change of language would be an evil. 
To say nothing of the facilities afforded by a 
common language in the ordinary intercourse 
of business, it should not be forgotten that our 
religion and our laws are studied in the language 
of the nation from which we are descended; 
and, with the loss of the language, we should 
finally suffer the loss of those peculiar advan- 
tages which we now derive from the investiga- 
tions of the jurists and divines of that country." 
To do what lay in his power to avert a calam- 
ity so appalling, was the object that Mr. Pick- 
ering had in view; and lest his own impressions 
should be faulty, or his imperfect knowledge of 
pure English should prove inadequate to the 

13 



194 O^^* Common Speech. 

task of properly branding all the principal 
American corruptions, he took the pains of 
submitting his list to several well-informed 
friends, and particularly to two English gentle- 
men whose authority he considered beyond 
question, although he admits that as they had 
lived some twenty years in America, '' their ear 
had lost much of that sensibility to deviations 
from the pure English idiom which would once 
have enabled them to pronounce with decision 
in cases where they now felt doubts." As finally 
published, the Vocabulary contains over five 
hundred words, of which not more than about 
seventy, less than a seventh of the whole num- 
ber, are really of American origin and now in 
respectable use. As examples may be cited — 
backwoodsman^ barbecue^ belittle^ bookstore^ bot- 
tornlajids^ breadstuff y caucus, clapboard, creek in 
the sense of brook or small stream, declension of 
an office, deed as a verb, desk for pulpit, dutiablcy 
to girdle a tree, gubernatorial y hominy, intervale, 
salt-lick, lot — a division of land, lumber, offset, 
pine barrens, portage, rapids, renewedly, samp, 
section of the country, sleigh, span of horses, 
and staging for scaffolding. The other six- 



American English. 195 

sevenths of the book consists of, first, mere 
vulgarisms and blunders ; second, unauthorized 
expressions invented by eccentric writers and 
never generally adopted ; and, third, words 
really British in their origin though not current 
in good London society — to which last class, 
by the way, it is highly probable that several 
of the terms above mentioned as genuine 
Americanisms might be transferred, were their 
full history known. 

VIII. 

Noah Webster's '' Letter to the Honor- 
able John Pickering on the subject of his 
Vocabulary'* is a duodecimo of sixty pages, 
dated ''Dec. 18 16.'* The lexicographer re- 
garded himself, or the principles that he taught, 
as at least indirectly attacked by the Vocabu- 
lary without necessity or reason. As for Mr. 
Pickering's apprehension that American speech 
might become in time so depraved that English 
authors could not be read in this country with- 
out translation, he says he *' might oppose to 
this supposition another, which is nearly as 



196 Our Common Speech. 

probable, that the rivers in America will turn 
their courses, and flow from the sea to the tops 
of the hills/' Whatever change may be taking 
place, moreover, he thinks it quite vain to at- 
tempt to stop, especially as changes are occur- 
ring in England as well : ** You take some 
pains," he says, *^ to ascertain the point, whether 
the people of this country now speak and write 
the English language with purity. The result 
is, that we have, in several instances, departed 
from the standard of the language, as spoken 
and written in England at the present day. Be 
it so — it is equally true, that the English have 
departed from the standard, as it appears in the 
works of Addison. And this is acknowledged 
by yourself. It is equally true that Addison, 
Pope and Johnson deviated from the standard 
of the age of Elizabeth. Now, sir, where is the 
remedy ? '' Wherever else it may lie — if remedy 
is desirable or possible — it certainly does not 
lie. Dr. Webster thought, in a slavish imitation 
of British practices. ** With regard to the gen- 
eral principle that we must use only such words 
as the English use," he proceeds, *' let me repeat, 
that the restriction is, in the nature of the thing. 



American English. 197 

impracticable, and the demand that we should 
observe it, is as improper as it is arrogant. 
Equally impertinent is it to ridicule us for 
retaining the use of genuine English words, 
because they happen to be obsolete in London, 
or in the higher circles of life. There are many 
instances in which we retain the genuine use of 
words, and the genuine Enghsh pronunciation, 
which they have corrupted; in pronunciation 
they have introduced more corruptions, within 
half a century, than were ever before introduced 
in five centuries, not even excepting the periods 
of conquest. Many of these changes in England 
are attributable to false principles, introduced 
into popular elementary books written by mere 
sciolists in language, and diffused by the instru- 
mentality of the stage. Let the English re- 
move the beam from their own eye, before they 
attempt to pull the mote from ours; and before 
they laugh at our vulgar keow^ geowUy neoWy let 
them discard their polite keind^ diVid geuide; a fault 
precisely similar in origin, and equally a perver- 
sion of genuine English pronunciation." Brave 
and sensible words are these ; their teaching 
may well be laid to heart to-day! 



198 Our Common Speech. 

IX. 

Dr. Elwyn's Glossary of Supposed Ameri- 
canisms was undertaken, as the preface informs 
us, ^' to show how much there yet remains, in 
this country, of language and customs directly 
brought from our remotest ancestry" — a pur- 
pose quite different from that of Mr. Pickering; 
but the chief value of the book is in the contri- 
bution it makes to our knowledge of Pennsyl- 
vania provincialisms, of which the author is 
evidently a careful observer. About four hun- 
dred 'and sixty words are included, of which a 
clear majority would be quite as little under- 
stood in decent American as in decent British 
society; but it seems that we have been accused 
of manufacturing the whole list, while the fact is 
that they are one and all of foreign origin. The 
book is carelessly written, and not accurately 
alphabetized. 

X. 

SCHELE DE Vere's '' AMERICANISMS,'' a small 
octavo of something less than seven hundred 



American English. ig^ 

pages, differs from the other works mentioned in 
not adopting the dictionary form, but presenting 
our verbal pecuharities as arranged in various 
classes — those invented by the Indian, the 
Dutchman, the Frenchman, the Spaniard, the 
German, the Negro, and the Chinaman ; ex- 
pressions peculiar to the West, to the church, 
to politics and to trade ; marine and railroad 
terms; cant and slang; new words and nick- 
names, etc. The author has been accused of 
plagiarizing from Bartlett, and doubtless did 
avail himself freely of the labors of that diligent 
lexicographer; but he added a good deal of 
original matter, and his book possesses an 
interest of its own, being indeed the only one 
of the seven (except perhaps Webster's) that 
is likely to be read entirely through. About 
four thousand items appear in the index. 

XI. 

Bartlett's Dictionary (or, to give the 
full title, ** Dictionary of Americanisms, a Glos- 
sary of Words and Phrases usually regarded as 
peculiar to the United States, by John Russell 
Bartlett,") is, in its latest edition, a bulky octavo 



200 Our Common Speech. 

of over eight hundred pages, exceedingly well 
printed, and containing something above five 
thousand six hundred entries, but hardly repre- 
senting, I think, more than about four hundred 
and fifty genuine and distinct Americanisms now 
in respectable use — less than one-twelfth of the 
whole number of articles. Of the remainder, 
nearly four hundred words and phrases are set 
down by the author himself as of British origin, 
some being used in this country in exactly the 
same manner as on their native soil, while others 
have been slightly altered in meaning, applica- 
tion or sound. At least three hundred and 
thirty more — and probably a much larger num- 
ber — are also certainly British, though Mr. 
Bartlett seems not to be aware of it. The rest 
of the dictionary — say four-fifths — is made up, 
partly of expressions never in general use, or 
long since antiquated ; partly of mere mispro- 
nunciations, grammatical errors and unautho- 
rized contractions ; partly of vulgar and disgust- 
ing slang; and partly of wearisome repetitions. 
Yet I by no means desire to be understood as 
setting down the work for a mass of rubbish. 
On the contrary, it contains a vast fund of inter- 



American English. 201 

esting and curious information, which any man 
devoted to the study of EngHsh dialects might 
well be proud to have brought together. Only 
it is a great pity that the diligent compiler, 
in his anxiety to make a big book, allowed him- 
self such extreme latitude in his conception of 
what constitutes an Americanism in speech, and 
consequently buried his grains of wheat under 
so appalling a mountain of chaff. 

It may be worth while to present some sam- 
ples of the words that are improperly included 
in Bartlett*s Dictionary, as showing the way 
in which a tremendous number of pseudo-Amer- 
icanisms have been, first and last, accumulated 
by people who find satisfaction in counting 
them up. 

Of the three hundred and eighty-five words 
and phrases that the author himself sets down 
as of British origin, the following examples 
may be mentioned : 

To beat one all-to-pieces, or all-to-smash ; allow, 
for assert ; argufy; awfully , for very ; bail, the handle 
of a bucket ; barm, for yeast ; botmd, for determined 
or resolved; a bull, on the stock exchange; bump- 
tious, for self-conceited; ca^i't come it; cap sheaf; 



202 Our Common Speech. 

cheeky for impudence; chowder; clip, a blow, as, 
^' he hit him a chp ; " to collide ; to cotton to a man ; 
cracker, for a small biscuit; cute ; to ^^/ stick; a 
^(f^:^ of cards ; deputize ; doxologize ; dreadful, for 
very, as "dreadful" fine; every once in a while; 
fall of the year ; first-rate ; fix, to put in order ; 
flapjack; flummux ; freshet; gallivant; galoshes; 
given name ; goodies ; to gulp; hand- running ; hard 
up ; heft, for weight ; help, for servants ; homely, not 
handsome ; hook, to steal ; immigration ; jeopardize ; 
julep; to keep company; to loan; mad, for angry; 
mighty, for very; old fogy ; over the left; pair of 
stairs ; pled, for pleaded ; pry, a lever ; to pull up 
stakes ; to reckon, meaning to think, believe or sup- 
pose; reliable; rooster; no great shakes ; sopho- 
mo7'e ; spell of weather ; spry ; spunk ; starvation ; 
stricken, for struck; sundown; swap; to take on; 
talented; teetotaller; ugly, for ill-tempered ; to wal- 
lop, and to whale ; whapper ; to whittle, and to wilt. 
In many cases no reason whatever is assigned for 
including these words in a list of Americanisms ; 
very seldom is any better cause mentioned than that 
they are provincial or antiquated in Great Britain ; 
and sometimes the pretext is of the most trivial 
character, as in the case of the word whittle, which 
is put in, forsooth, because both the verb and the 
practice are thought to be more common in America 



American English. 203 

than in England ! But the most surprising instance 
among this class of words has yet to be mentioned — 
the use of the adverb " i77tmediately,'" in place of the 
phrase " as soon as " — '' the deer fell dead immedi- 
ately they shot him." This wretched expression, Mr. 
Bartlett writes, is creeping into use from England. 
What possible sense there can be in counting as an 
Americanism a villanously ungrammatical construc- 
tion which is *^ creeping into use in this country 
from England," it would puzzle Fitzedward Hall him- 
self to explain. 

Among words and phrases erroneously sup- 
posed by Mr. Bartlett to be peculiar to this 
country, the following have been pointed out 
by various reviewers of the dictionary: 

Baggage ; bender^ a spree ; blackberry ; blow, to 
brag ; bluff, a high bank ; \,o do a thing b^^own ; bug, 
as a general term ; bureau, a chest of drawers ; cata- 
mount; choker, a cravat; chore; crevasse; cunning, 
in the sense of small and pretty; educational ; eel- 
grass; to egg on; engineer of a locomotive; every 
which way ; expect, for suppose ; fast, for dissi- 
pated ; fellowship, as a verb ; female, for woman ; 
-first- class ; to go to the bad; to go gunning; in a 
horn, meaning " over the left ; " kink, an accidental 



204 Our Common Speech. 

knot or twist ; the whole kit of them ; 7nuss^ a state 
of confusion ; notions^ small wares or trifles ; rail- 
road, as the equivalent of railway; sappy, meaning 
silly ; slosh^ soft mud ; smack, a blow ; splurge ; 
spree ; swingleti^ee ; a. good time ; and tiptop. 

To these may be added (among many others) 
the following, which I believe no previous 
reviewer has noted: 

Account — In phrase ^^of no account "= no im- 
portance. The exact phrase will be found in Dickens* 
Uncommercial Traveler, chap. 6. 

Airy — Conceited. This may be found in "Al- 
bion's England," by one Warner, published in the 
mother country in 1606. 

All-fired, — Set down as a British provincialism by 
a writer in Macmillan's Magazine, vol. 5, p. 244. 

Alley — A child's marble. So used by Defoe in 
1720. 

Allspice, — Dates back at least to Burton's Anatomy 
of Melancholy, 1621. 

Ampersand — The short character for the word 
and. This is found in Halliwell. 

Appointable, — Used by Foxe, 1563. 

Back out, — A natural combination of words hardly 
deserving place among any sort of isms. It may be 
found in Scott's Rob Roy, published 1818. 



American English. 205 

Backward — Bashful. So used in Swift's Tale of 
a Tub, 1 704. 

Baggage — A traveller's impedimenta. Repeatedly 
so used by'Shakspeare. 

Baiting — Luncheon. Is in the Promptorium Par- 
vulorum, fifteenth century. 

Balk — Said of a horse. Traced back in England 
to the fifteenth century. 

Bang up — Superior. American origin very doubt- 
ful. Occurs in '^ Rejected Addresses," 1812. 

Bark — To girdle a tree. Used by Shakspeare in 
Henry VIII. 

Beef, an ox, and Blaze, a mark on a tree, are both 
in Halliwell. 

Be liked, — Traced back in England to 1557. 

Belongings, — Possibly of American origin, but was 
certainly used in England in 181 7. 

Bilberry — A plant. Merry Wives of Windsor, V. 5. 

Bilk — A cheat. Used by Marvell, 1672. 

Bindweed, — Mentioned in Turner's " Names of 
Herbes," 1548. 

Blue-blooded — May be of American origin, but 
seems to be pretty well naturalized abroad, as Maria 
Edgeworth uses it in '^ Helen," 1834. 

Bluefish, — Phil. Trans. XXXVIII. 318 (a. d. 1 734). 

Boo-hoo, — Used by Skelton^ 1525. 

Bowling Alley, — Occurs, according to Murray, in 
British laws of the sixteenth century. 



2o6 Our Common Speech. 

Bright — Intelligent. Occurs in Macbeth. 

Brummagen — Spurious. A contemptuous phrase 
"Brummagen Protestants" was in use in England 
in 1681. 

Bully — Fine. Chetham's "Angler's Vade-Mecum/' 
1681. 

By and Large. Found in Sturmy's Mariner's 
Magazine, 1669. 

Caboose (of a freight train'). Practically the same 
use as that defined in Falconer's Marine Dictionary 
of 1769 — "a sort of house which somewhat resem- 
bles a sentry box." 

Carry on — To frolic. Certainly well naturalized 
abroad. Is found in " Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde." 

Chance — To risk. Now used in Great Britain. 
A vulgarism ; but not an Americanism. 

Chess — A weed. Used by very old writers on 
agriculture in England. 

Chipper — Lively. Provincial in the Isle of 
Wight. 

Clever^ in the sense of good-natured. This is in 
Halliwell — said to be provincial in the south of 
England. 

Connection^ in the phrase ^'in this connection^ 
Used in Great Britain certainly as long ago as 1780. 

Cookey — A little cake. In Prof. J. F. W. Johns- 
ton's " Notes on North America," chap. 23, vol. 2, p. 



American English. 207 

296, we read that this word is familiar to a Scotch- 
man's ears. 

Cradle Scythe is in HalHwell. 

Firedogs — Andirons. This is found in Brockett's 
Glossary of North-Country Words. 

Hulking (unwieldly), J^ack-at-a-pinch, and Pitch- 
in, are all in Halliwell. 

Hicnk — A large piece. Provincial in the Isle of 
Wight. 

Right for very. Fancy setting this down as an 
Americanism ! Did Mr. Bartlett ever hear of a Right 
Honorable minister of Great Britain, or ever read the 
139th Psalm — " Marvellous are thy works, and that 
my soul knoweth right well " ? 

To set to rights. This is said by Elwyn to be an 
Essex provincialism. 

Safe — A place of security. This also is in Elwyn, 
and said to be from Suffolk. 

Sauce — Impudence. This is in Halliwell. 

Shinny — A boy's game. This is in Brockett. 

Span, for perfectly. The expression '^ span new " 
is as old as Chaucer. 

Stand, a platform, and Stock, equivalent to cattle, 
are both in Halliwell. 

Stop for stay, as ^^ I am stopping at a hotel. '* The 
insertion of this detestable Briticism in a dictionary of 
Americanisms, of all places in the world, is one of the 



2o8 Our Common Speech. 

absurdities of the book. Everybody who knows any- 
thing about the variations of the language as spoken 
in the two countries knows that it is heard a thousand 
times in England for once that it is noticed here. 

Square — Honest. Shakspeare — Timon of Athens, 
V. 5 ; Antony and Cleopatra, II. 2. 

Too thin. Here is another Americanism of a very 
remarkable kind. Smollett was guilty of it, for he 
wrote, in *^ Peregrine Pickle " (published 1751), chap. 
26 : '^ This pretext was too thin to impose upon her 
lover.'* And Shakspeare, a century and more earlier, 
in Henry VIII., Act 5, Scene 2, makes the king say: 
^^ You were ever good at sudden commendations. 
Bishop of Winchester. But know I come not to hear 
such flattery now, and in my presence ; they are too 
thin and base to hide offences.'' Other instances 
could no doubt be found in plenty, if it were worth 
while to look for them. But when one considers 
that the phrase is invariably apphed — as Smollett 
applies it — to pretexts, coverings, what can be more 
obvious than that it must necessarily always have 
been, not only perfectly good English, but the sim- 
plest and most natural expression imaginable ? The 
insertion of a phrase like that in a list of American- 
isms or any other sort of isms, only shows what follies 
men may be led into, upon whom the craze for mak- 
ing long compilations has once seized. 



American English. 209 

Tophet — The place of torment. This familiar 
Biblical term is of course just as much an American- 
ism as is Eden, or Babylon, or Jerusalem. 

Touch-and-go, Who does not remember the 
^^ touch-and-go young Barnacle *' of the Circumlocu- 
tion Office in Charles Dickens' "Little Dorrit"? 

Tramps a strolling vagabond, is in Halliwell. 

^^Well,'' a meaningless prefix to a sentence. The 
word is twice used in this way by highly-aristocratic 
speakers in the first chapter of Beaconsfield's " Endy- 
mion." The author would have been slightly amused 
if Mr. Bartlett had informed him that he represented 
Sidney Wilton and William Ferrars as conversing in 
the American dialect. 

It would be unprofitable to detail examples 
of the mere errors, vulgar expressions and slang 
terms which Mr. Bartlett enumerates as pecu- 
liarly American. A few instances of his sense- 
less repetitions, enlarging the book to no possible 
good, may be mentioned with less disgust : 

"Bankit (French Banquette) '^ is defined as a 
sidewalk in Louisiana. Immediately below we have 
" banquette, the name for the sidewalk in some of 
our southern cities.*' "Bowie," and "bowie-knife'* 
are separately entered. "Breakbone " is "a species 

H 



2IO Our Common Speech. 

of fever/' and then follows " breakbone fever," with 
full definition. " Bulldoze " is ^' to intimidate," and 
on the next page we have ^^to bulldoze/' ^Uo intimi- 
date by violent means." A "filibuster" is a free- 
booter; "filibustering" is " freebooting ; " and "to 
filibuster" is "to acquire by freebooting; " three sep- 
arate entries. " A loafer "is an idle lounger, and " to 
loaf" is "to lounge." "To lynch/' "lyncher" and 
" lynch law " are separately explained. " Muss/' a 
corruption of "mess/' is first elaborately defined as a 
noun, with examples, and then as a verb. A " pony " 
is a translation, and " to pony " is to use a translation. 
" To post " a person is to inform him, and then we 
are told that "posted" means informed. "To red 
up/' meaning to set in order, is twice defined — once 
on page 517 and again on page 520. "To run" is 
"to cause to run," with the phrase "to run a church " 
as an example ; and just below we find another entry 
— "to run a church," "to have the charge of a 
church." " To spin street yarn " (page 6^6) is " to 
go gadding about the streets;" and on page 798, 
under the heading " street yarn," we learn that " to 
spin street yarn " is " to frequent the streets without 
any definite object." A " stove pipe " is a tall hat ; 
and then follows a second entry, " stove pipe hat, 
a tall hat." A "suck in" is "a cheat," and "to 
suck in" is " to take in, to cheat." Many more 



American English. 211 

instances might be mentioned ; but it is hardly neces- 
sary to go further than this, in order to show how the 
book is filled up and expanded, without rhyme or 
reason. Mr. Bartlett would have done better to take 
pattern from HalliwelPs admirable dictionary, a work 
that contains nearly ten times as many entries as the 
Dictionary of Americanisms, but fills less than fifty 
more pages. 

Coming now to genuine Americanisms, words 
and phrases really peculiar to this country, or 
used here in a sense never recognized in Eng- 
land, the following are among those which are 
either omitted by Bartlett or about which he 
makes statements that seem to invite remark: 

Blizzard, — This word Mr. Bartlett defines as '^ a 
poser,'* having noticed, apparently, only a single 
instance of its use, and jumped at the conclusion 
that this is the meaning intended. He adds the 
comment, ^'not known in the Eastern States," which 
was generally true, no doubt, until the sharp winter 
of i88o-'8i familiarized the term — as well as the 
thing itself, in a greatly modified form — to the resi- 
dents of the East. I suppose I need not say that 
a real blizzard, as the word is now understood, is a 
terrific storm, with low barometer, light clouds or 



212 Our Common Speech. 

none at all, *^ and the air full of particles of snow, in 
the form of dry, sharp crystals, which, driven before 
the wind, bite and sting like fire." The term is said 
to have made its first appearance in print about 
the year i860, in a newspaper called the Northern 
Vindicator, published at Estherville, Minn. Its ety- 
mology can only be guessed at, but there has been 
no lack of guesses. The English word blister ; the 
French bouillard (see Surenne's Dictionary) ; the 
German blitz ; the Spanish brisa ; the surname Bliz- 
zard (said to be common around Baltimore) ; an 
unpronounceable Sioux term; and the Scotch verb 
blizzen, of which Jamieson's Dictionary remarks that 
"drought is said to be blizzening when the wind 
parches and withers the fruits of the earth" — all 
these, and I know not how many other words in 
different languages, have been suggested, with various 
degrees of improbability, as the origin of the term. 
My own conjecture is, that it is simply an onomato- 
poeia ; an attempt, not wholly unsuccessful, to rep- 
resent the whistling and " driving " noise of a terrible 
storm. It should be added, before leaving this word, 
that it seems to have been occasionally used in vari- 
ous places in the Eastern States, for a long time past, 
in significations quite different from its present mean- 
ing. Thus a newspaper correspondent writes from 
Solon, Me., to the effect that twenty or thirty years 



American English. 213 

ago the phrase " let her blizzard " was common in 
that locaHty, meaning '^ let her go," as applied to 
the act of firing a gun or throwing a stone. Another, 
living in Perry County, Pa., has heard the word for 
many years as the equivalent of a drink — " let 's 
take a blizzard/' It is said also to have been in 
use in the same county in its present signification, 
as early as 1836, but to have become obsolete in 
this meaning, years ago. A well-informed friend at 
the West writes me as below : '^ This word is in 
common use in Texas, and has been for many years, 
to describe a very severe ' norther.* It has been 
stated to me on competent authority that the ther- 
mometer has been known to register from, say, 86° 
down to 26°, the change being effected within the 
space of six or seven hours ! This has always been 
popularly known as a blizzard. When the tempera- 
ture in the summer season would be lowered only say 
20°, it was known only as a norther. I think the term 
has gradually crept northward, until its significance 
is generally understood west of the Mississippi.'* 

Bogus. — This word is older than the earliest date 
given by Bartlett, June 12, 1857; it was used in the 
Painesville (O.) Telegraph of July 6, 1827. Also 
the etymology which he gives (a corruption of Bar- 
ghese) is not certain. It is said (by the Augusta, 
Ga., Chronicle) to be from the name of one William 



214 O^^ Common Speech. 

A. Bogus, '^ Si Georgia land lottery commissioner, 
caught in rascality, an issuer of fraudulent land 
rights ; '' and it has been conjectured to be a variant 
oi dagasse (sugar-cane refuse), or an abbreviation of 
iantrabogus, said to be old Vermont slang for any 
object of evil appearance. 

Boom — A semi-slang expression (which first 
appeared in the 1881 supplement to Worcester) 
descriptive of a sudden advance in popularity or in 
price. Said to be borrowed from the mining phrase- 
ology of the far West, where a process called " boom- 
ing" is sometimes adopted to clear off surface soil 
and reveal supposed mineral veins. An artificial 
reservoir is constructed near the summit of a moun- 
tain, which is first allowed to fill with water and is 
then suddenly opened, whereupon a terrific torrent 
rushes down the slope, carrying rocks, trees, earth 
and all, with resistless force. A newspaper writer 
says he has '' seen gullies fifty, seventy-five, and in 
some places a hundred feet deep, and extending the 
whole length of the mountain," cut out by single 
booms. *^The word booming," he adds, ^*has there- 
fore a very significant meaning, and is expressive as 
a word phrase, for it denotes an overv/helming, 
irresistible power and force." 

To buck against — To oppose violently. I sup- 
pose this verb to be of American invention. 



American English. 215 

Caiiaille — Shorts, or low grades of flour; so de- 
fined in the Worcester Supplement, where it is said 
to be common in Canada and New England. 

Casket — A kind of coffin. This first appeared in 
the Webster Supplement of 1879. 

CoaL Bartlett blunders fearfully in attempting to 
give the names of the different sizes of coal. His 
list is: I, Broken or furnace coal, being the largest 
lumps ; 2, Stove or range ; 3, Pea or nut ; 4, Egg ; 

5, Coal dust. I believe the correct nomenclature is : 
I, Furnace; 2, Egg; 3, Stove; 4, Chestnut; 5, Pea; 

6, Buckwheat ; 7, Coal dust. 

Coral of lobster — Unimpregnated eggs ; first 
appeared (incorrectly defined) in the Webster Sup- 
plement. 

Dodger — A small hand-bill; first defined in the 
Century Dictionary. 

Escalan — Twelve and a-half cents, a New Orleans 
term not in the dictionaries. 

Fair — An exhibition, not primarily for the pur- 
pose of sale. This very common American use of 
the word was not recognized by any dictionary in 
common use until the publication, in March, 1890, 
of the second volume of the Century. Long before 
that date, however, it had passed into very respect- 
able British use — see for instance the Westminster 
Review for October, 1881 — No. 230, p. 247. 



2i6 Our Common Speech. 

Fakir — First a magician, then a showman with a 
worthless exhibit, lastly a cheat. These applications 
of the term appear to be of American origin, as are 
the derivative /^/^^ (noun and verb) and the altered 
spelling faker, 

F7'ench — A term used in Maryland and Virginia 
for anything that is greatly disliked. *' For instance,'* 
says a writer, ^^ the tobacco gets the worm in it 
that destroys it ; they call in ^ frenching.' And if the 
children have the measles very bad, it is ^ French,' 
and the same with a bad case of small-pox — it is the 
/ y ^ real French small-pox.' " 

Furore — An excitement; first noticed in the Cen- 
tury. Bartlett overlooked it, though it appears in 
one of his citations, under the heading " Nick." 

Gripsack — A recently- invented and rather vulgar 
term for a satchel, chiefly heard, I beheve, at the 
West. 

Handglass, Bartlett says handglasses are specta- 
cles. My impression is that the term generally 
denotes a small looking-glass. 

Highwines, I am not certain that this is an Ameri- 
can coinage, but I believe it appears in no dictionary 
except the Worcester Supplement. 

Institute — A convention. Farmers' institutes — 
meetings lasting two or three days, with lectures and 
discussions, are very common. 



American English. 217 

Keet, Bartlett says "Guinea keets " are Guinea 
fowls. I think the "keets" are Guinea eggs — so 
called at the West. See Milwaukee Republican- 
Sentinel, Dec. 7, 1882, (No. 12,551,) second page, 
second column. 

Listing — A method of planting corn ; see Cultivator 
& Country Gentleman, vol. 49, p. 187. 

Mugwump, Introduced into common use since 
Bartlett published. First defined in the Webster In- 
ternational of 1890. 

Mung news. Bartlett says this means false news. 
I have never heard the word ; but a writer in Black- 
wood's Edinburgh Magazine for October, 1877, says it 
is the preterite of the old English verb niing^ to mix 
— whence mingle — and means, not false, but con- 
fused, mingled, mixed up. 

You must not, as the reverse of you may, I am in- 
clined to think this is an Americanism, as I judge 
that the English generally say " you may not ** — in 
which, if so, they are certainly more logical than we. 
" You must " means that an obligation rests upon 
you j therefore " you must not," ought to mean merely 
that there is no obligation. " You may," means that 
permission is granted, and therefore when permission 
is withheld and the action prohibited, the phrase 
ought to be "you may not," instead of the universal 
American practice of saying " you must not." 



21 8 Our Common Speech. 

Closely allied to this, is the incorrect use of can 
for may^ where there is no question of ability — which 
seems to be rather more prevalent in this country 
than in England. A Hne on the face of our postal- 
cards formerly made the statement that " nothing 
but the address can be placed on this side." The 
possessor of the card can place there any number of 
words that there is room for, if he pleases. What is 
meant is, of course, that nothing but the address may 
be placed there ; that is, it is forbidden to place there 
anything else, under penalty of forfeiting the privilege 
of sending the card by mail. The EngHsh newspaper 
wrappers have a similar notice, correctly worded : 
" This wrapper may only be used for newspapers, or 
for such documents as are allowed to be sent at the 
book-rate.'' 

Ninepence — T^tlYt and a-half cents. Formerly 
used in New England and Virginia. 

Fit — The stone of a fruit. '' Mostly confined to 
New York State," Bartlett says. I think the term is 
now common at the West, and used to some extent 
in the South, at least in Alabama. 

Railroad Nomenclature, Bartlett gives a list of 
eighteen objects pertaining to railroads, which have 
different names in the two countries ; but fails to note 
that the American " buffer " is the English " bumper," 
and the American ^^ grade " the English ^^ gradient." 



American English. 219 

Round-up — An annual collection of cattle on the 
plains of the West, for branding and other purposes. 
Perhaps from Spanish rodear, to encompass. 

Sheeny, This means, Bartlett says, *^a sharp fel- 
low." I think it is a cant term for a Jew, entirely ir- 
respective of his character. 

Smitch — A very small quantity of anything. This 
word is noted by a writer in Lippincott's Magazine 
for March, 1869, as peculiar to Carbon County, Pa. 
1 have heard it in Albany. 

Solid-colored — All of the same color. This ex- 
pression, very common among breeders of Jersey 
cattle, and also used, I believe, in the dry-goods 
trade, may not be an Americanism perhaps, but no 
British dictionary defines it. 

Super, Bartlett says this is a contraction of " su- 
perintendent of factories, theatres," etc. What the 
" super " of a factory may be, if there is an official so 
called, I do not know ; but the '' super," or, as he is 
commonly called, the ^^ supe " at a theatre, is cer- 
tainly by no means a superintendent, but a super- 
numerary. 

Sweeny — A kind of muscular atrophy in horses. 
First defined in Webster International, though an old 
word. It may be found in the Cultivator of October, 
1843, P- 166, and in Jennings' "Horse and his 
Diseases," copyrighted i860, p. 297. 



220 Our Common Speech. 

Tenderfoot — A new arrival from civilization in the 
wild regions of the far West ; see Scribner's Monthly, 
vol. 1 8, p. 815. Noticed in Webster International. 

Trousers — Equivalent of pantalets ; see Harper's 
Magazine, May, 185 1, p. 864. Perhaps not an 
Americanism, but the dictionaries define trouse^^s as 
a garment for males only. 

Whiskey, It is perhaps to Mr. Bartlett's credit 
that he does not seem to be very well " up " on the 
varieties of this popular beverage, as he remarks that 
"Bourbon whiskey is the best, being made of rye." 
As to the question of Bourbon's being the best, there 
may be differences of opinion; our Scotch and Irish 
friends, to say nothing of others, would perhaps dis- 
sent from the lexicographer's judgment ; but as to 
Bourbon's being made of rye, we must all take excep- 
tion to that statement, the fact being, I believe, that 
Bourbon never contains more than one-third of rye, 
and seldom as much as that. 

To these genuine Americanisms may be added 
a few scientific or pseudo-scientific words, such as 
phonography photophoney aiidiphone and lysimeter. 
Telephoney as may not be generally known, is, 
like telegraph, much older than the apparatus 
that we now call by these terms ; the original 
telegraph was a semaphore, and the original 



American English. 221 

telephone, I believe, a speaking trumpet. And 
if time permitted, and the game were worth the 
candle, a numerous list of curious names of 
places, of American invention, might be com- 
piled from the Post-Office Directory. Mr. 
Bartlett has done something at this, in his pref- 
ace ; but he failed to notice Why Not, Autumn 
Leaves, Bird-in-Hand and Youngwomanstown, 
Pa. ; Bogus, Fiddletown, Hay Fork, Port Wine 
and Yankee Jim's, Cal. ; Nola Chucky, Jim Ned, 
Mouse Tail, A. B. C. and U Bet, Tenn. ; Long 
Year and The Corner, N. Y. ; Hash Knife and 
Mud Creek, Texas; Star of the West, Sub 
Rosa and Gum Log, Ark. ; Non Intervention, 
Va. ; Quashquetown, Iowa ; Medybemps, Me. ; 
Rooster Rock, Oregon ; Look Out, Dak. ; Rab- 
bit Hash, Ky.; TyTy, Geo.; Zig, Mo.; Skull 
Valley, Ariz. ; Greenhorn, Left Hand, Ni Wot 
and O. Z., Col.; T. B., Md., and scores of other 
oddities that might be mentioned. It is a 
thousand pities that we have not preserved a 
greater number of the more euphonious geogra- 
phical names of the aborigines ; and it is to be 
sincerely hoped that as refinement and good 
taste become more general, we shall by degrees 



222 Our Common Speech. 

weed out most of these rough-and-ready 
appellations. 

XII. 

Mr. John S. Farmer's work, ** American- 
isms Old and New," is a '' foolscap quarto '' of 
about 590 pages, ''privately printed" in what is 
intended to be a very ornamental (but is not a 
very tasteful) style, elaborately bound, and sold 
at a high price to subscribers only, each copy 
being signed and numbered. It is unique in 
being the production, not only of an Englishman, 
but of an Englishman who seems never to have 
visited the United States, and whose ideas of 
our geography and history are of the vaguest 
description. He calls this country ** the future 
mighty commonwealth of the southern seas " 
(p. ix.), counts Maine and Vermont among the 
original thirteen (p. 221), and names *' Vir- 
ginia, North-Carolina, South-Carolina, Georgia " 
— these four only — as the Southern States 
(p. 506). Innumerable minor blunders are there- 
fore not surprising — such for example as the 
statement that *' under the rigid Wall Street 
rules every transaction is an actual purchase 



American English. 223 

and sale of actual stock ; the broker who sells 
one hundred shares of Erie actually delivers to 
the purchaser the certificate of stock issued by 
the company '' (p. 93). Elsewhere we read 
that the term bulldoze originally referred '* to an 
association of negroes formed to insure, by vio- 
lent and unlawful means, the success of an 
election '* (p. 100); that spelling bees originated 
in the Western States (p. 507) ; that bank bill is 
*' the name by which Bank of England notes are 
generally known throughout the States ; '* that 
biibby is *' a pet name for a baby " (p. 91) ; that 
z. freezer is a refrigerator (p. 254) ; that *^ previ- 
ous to 1878 greenbacks for amounts down to ten 
cents were current/* and that *^ Gi^eejibackers \yqvq 
those who, previous to the resumption of specie 
payment for the smaller amount just named, 
opposed the change " (p. 276) ; that huckleberry 
is '* a kind of blackberry " (p. 308) ; that jag 
is ^* a slang term for an umbrella" (p. 321); 
that ^' may-be is invariably used for perhaps " 
(p. 361) ; that ''a cent piece" is '^made of nicker* 
(p. 389) ; that the Northwestern States are Ohio, 
Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minne- 
sota, Iowa and Nebraska (p. 393) ; that poker is 



224 Our Common Speech. 

*' as universally played in America as is whist in 
England '' (p. 429) ; that a sack coat is '* a tweed 
cloth coat " (p. 468) ; that a sarcophagus is *' a 
leaden cofifin" (p. 471); and that a stateroom on 
a steamer is ** the cabin" (p. 515). The book 
is in fact utterly useless as a source of informa- 
tion; no reliance can be placed on any state- 
ment made in its pages. Credit should never- 
theless be given to Mr. Farmer for his entire 
freedom from the insular superciliousness that 
one might naturally expect to find him combin- 
ing with his ignorance of the United States. 
He is studiously courteous as well as fair; and 
he goes out of his way to remark (p. 48) that 
" American English, taking the people all 
round, is much purer than the vernacular of 
the mother country." On the whole, therefore, 
and considering the fund of amusement that his 
" portentous catch-guinea " (as the New York 
Post called the book on its appearance) is certain 
to afford them, Americans have every reason to 
be grateful to Mr. Farmer, and to wish him well 
Would that all our British critics possessed the 
same elementary qualification for discussing the 
peculiarities of the American language ! 



American English. 225 



XIII. 

Col. Norton's ** Political American- 
isms " contains some 350 entries — among which 
it is a Httle surprising to find boycotty '^ an adap- 
tation from the Irish NationaHsts, with the same 
general meaning." An occasional slip — such 
as the statements that the term half-breed was 
" originally applied to certain Republicans of 
New- York who wavered in their party allegiance 
during a bitter contest over the U. S. senator- 
ship in 1881," and that ''every Democratic 
newspaper has a cut of a ' rooster ' in the act of 
crowing," which '' is invariably printed at the 
head of a column announcing a party victory " 
— will be noted by the critical reader ; but the 
work is on the whole remarkably well done and 
likely to prove serviceable. It belongs of course 
to rather a different class from that of the pre- 
ceding treatises on Americanisms, and hardly 
calls for extended review. 



15 



226 Our Common Speech. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY. 



I. Books entirely Devoted to " Americanisms.*' 

1. A Vocabulary, or Collection of Words and Phrases 

which have been supposed to be peculiar to the 
United States, to which is prefixed an Essay on the 
Present State of the English Language in the United 
States. By John Pickering. Boston ; Cummings 
& Hilhard, 1816; 8vo. ; pp. 208. 

2. Letter to the Hon. John Pickering, on the subject of 

his Vocabulary. By Noah Webster. Boston ; 
West & Richardson, 181 7 ; small 8vo. ; pp. 60. 

3. Glossary of Supposed Americanisms, collected by 

Alfred L. Elwyn, M. D. Philadelphia; J. B. 
Lippincott & Co., 1859; i2mo. ; pp. 122. 

4. Americanisms ; the EngHsh of the New World. By 

M. Schele de Verb, LL. D. New York ; Charles 
Scribner & Co., 1872; 8vo. ; pp. 6S6. 

5. Dictionary of Americanisms ; a Glossary of Words 

and Phrases usually regarded as peculiar to the 
United States. By John Russell Bartlett. 
Fourth edition. Boston ; Little, Brown & Co., 
1877; 8vo. ; pp. 814. 



American English, 227 

6. Americanisms, Old and New, a Dictionary of Words, 

Phrases and Colloquialisms peculiar to the United 
States, British America, the West Indies, etc., etc., 
their Derivation, Meaning and Application, together 
with numerous Anecdotal, Historical, Explanatory 
and Folk-Lore Notes. Compiled and edited by 
John S. Farmer. London ; Thos. Poulter & Sons, 
1889; "foolscap 4to."; pp. 564. 

7. Political Americanisms ; a Glossary of Terms and 

Phrases current at different periods in American 
Politics. By Charles Ledyard Norton. New 
York; Longmans, Green & Co., 1890; i6mo. ; pp. 
134. 



n. Chapters or Parts of Books. 

1. John Witherspoon, D. D. Essays on American- 

isms, Perversions of Language in the United States, 
Cant Phrases, etc., in 4th vol. of his works, pub- 
lished in 8vo., Philadelphia, 1801. (The earliest 
work on American vulgarisms. Originally pub- 
lished as a series of essays, entitled *' The Druid," 
which appeared in a periodical in 1761.) 

2. Adiel Sherwood. Gazetteer of Georgia. Charles- 

ton, 1827; Philadelphia, 1829; Washington, 1837. 
Has glossary of slang and vulgar words used in the 
Southern States. 

3. T. Romeyn Beck, M. D., LL. D. " Notes on Pick- 

ering's Vocabulary." Albany Institute Transac- 
tions, Vol. L, p. 25 ; Albany, N. Y., 1830. 



228 Our Common Speech. 

4. James Russell Lowell. Biglow Papers, 1848, 

1864. Introductions to First and Second Series, 
and Glossary. 

5. Charles Astor Bristed. " The English Language 

in America," in Cambridge Essays. London ; John 
W. Parker & Son, 1855. (Shows "rare" meat, 
and " corned " for drunk^ to be expressions of 
English origin.) 

6. W. C. Fowler, LL. D. English Grammar. New 

York; Harper & Bros., 1855, 8vo. ; pp. 119-129. 
Also i2mo., 1858; pp. 23-27. 

7. George P. Marsh. Lectures on the English Lan- 

guage. Fourth edition; New York; Charles Scrib- 
ner's Sons, 1859. Lecture 30, "The Enghsh 
Language in America." 

8. G. F. Graham. A Book about Words ; London ; 

Longmans, Green & Co., 1869 ; chap. 13, '' Slang 
Words and Americanisms." 

9. R. G White. Words and Their Uses ; New York ; 

Sheldon & Co., 1870; chap, 3, '^British-English 
and American-Enghsh." Also, Every-day English ; 
Boston; Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1880; chap. 6, 
"American Speech." 

10. Prof. W. D. Whitney. Language and the Study 

of Language, 5th edition ; New York ; Charles 
Scribner & Co., 1870 ; pp. 171-174. 

11. G. C. Eggleston. a Man of Honor; New York; 

Orange Judd Co., 1873. (Illustrates various Vir- 
ginia provincialisms.) 

12. A.J.Ellis. Early English Pronunciation ; London; 

Triibner & Co., 1874. Part 4, pp. i2i7-'3o. (In- 



American English. 229 

eludes considerable notice of pronunciation used 
by American humorists.) 

13. G. A. Barringer. "-Etude sur V Anglais parte 

aux Etats Unis {La Langue Americaine),^'' in 
Actes de ta Societe P hilologique de.Paris^ March, 
1874. (Largely transferred from De Vere.) 

14. Gilbert M. Tucker. ''American English." Al- 

bany Institute Transactions, Vol. X. p. 334; Al- 
bany, N. Y., 1883. 

15. Rev. Dr. Samuel Fallows. Synonyms and Anto- 

nyms; New York; F. H. Revell, 1886 ; pp. 294- 
342. " Dictionary of Americanisms, Briticisms, 
etc." 

16. R. O. Williams. Our Dictionaries; New York; 

Henry Holt & Co., 1890; pp. 71-128. 

17. Brander Matthews. Americanisms and Briti- 

cisms ; New York ; Harper & Bros., 1892 ; pp. 
1-59. 

18. Various Encyclopedias — the Americana, Appleton's, 

Chambers', Library of Universal Knowledge, etc. 
Article, "Americanisms." 

19. Worcester's Dictionary, ed. 188 1, p. /. 



III. Articles in British Periodicals. 

[The figures at the left of the decimal point indicate the volume ; 
those at the right, the page.] 

Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine: 89.421; 102.399 

C Inroads upon English.") 
Chambers' Journal : Dec. 20, 1873, P- ^o^ \ March 31, 



230 Our Common Speech. 

1875, P- 171 ("American Nicknames"); Sept. 25, 
1875, P- 609; Jan. 30, 1886, p. 70. 

CoRNHiLL Magazine : 58.363. 

Eclectic Review: (N. S.) 13.356 — April, 1820 (Re- 
view of Pickering). 

Illustrated London News : 82.87 (G. A. Sala, Review 
of Tucker in North-American Review); 84.339 (Sala, 
Review of Tucker in Albany Institute Transactions); 
84.543 (Sala, Reply to Smalley in N. Y. Tribune). 

Knowledge: 6.319; 8. 171; 9.159, 178, 196, 249, 275, 
332, 352 ; 10.14, 38, 41, 66, 113, 183, 230, 274 ; 11.28, 
82, 129, 183, 223. 

Leisure Hour : 26.110; 36.827. 

Longmans' Magazine: 1.80 ("Some Points in Ameri- 
can Speech and Customs," by E. A. Freeman). 

Nineteenth Century, September, 1880. (" English, 
Rational and Irrational," by Fitzedward Hall.) 

Penny Magazine: July 21, 1838, p. 278. (Severe on 
American Speech.) 

Quarterly Review : 10.528. 

Saturday Review : 60.709 (Review of " Political Amer- 
icanisms " in Mag. of Am. Hist.); 62.142; 62.190. 

Spectator : 62.493 (Review of Farmer). 

Westminster Review : 130.35 (no dialects in United 
States); No. 234, Oct., 1882, p. 279, Scott edition 
(admits that the English call now '-^ nao "). 



American English. 231 



IV. Articles in American Periodicals. 

Analectic Magazine : 3.404. (Sarcastic [?] defense 
of American freedom of speech ; recommends inven- 
tion of a new language.) 

Appletons' Journal: (N. S.) 11.315. ('^English and 
American-English," by Richard A. Proctor, from 
Gentleman's Magazine — copied also, in part, in 
N. Y. Tribune, Aug. 14, 1881.) 

Atlantic Monthly: 6.667-, 40.233; 41.495 (R. G. 
White, Review of Bartlett) : 41.656 (do.); 42.97 
(do.); 42.342 (do.); 42.619 (do.); 42.643 (Reply- 
to White) ; 43.88 (White on Bartlett); 43.109 (freight 
train and spool); 43.379 (White on Bartlett) ; ^Z-^S^ 
(do.) ; 44.654 (White, " Assorted Americanisms ") ; 
45.428 (Reply to White) ; 45.669 (White, " British 
Americanisms ") ; 47.697 (White, supplementary to 
Bartlett articles); 48.849; 52.792; 53.286; 53.290; 
55-593 (R- A. Proctor, " The Misused H of Eng- 
land ") ; 55.856 (right away). 

Buffalo Commercial Advertiser: Sept. lo-ii, 1888. 
(Article on pronunciation, from Critic.) 

Canadian Monthly : 1.87. (Review of De Vere ) 

Century : 47(25).848 (" Wild Flowers of English 
Speech in America," by Edward Eggleston) ; 48- 
(26). 867 (" Folk Speech in America," by Edward 
Eggleston). 

Chicago News: March 10, 1890. (London Letter from 
Eugene Field.) 

Critic : 13.97, 104, 115, 263. 



232 Our Common Speech. 

Forum : 2. 11 7. ("Americanisms in England," by A. C. 
Coxe.) 

Galaxy: 21.521 (White, Pronunciation); 24.376 (White 
on Bartlett) ; 24.681 (do.). 

Harper's Monthly: 66.66s (Sussex expressions); 
83.215 (Brander Matthews, Briticisms and Ameri- 
canisms) ; SS'2y7 (Matthews, American spelling) ; 
90.252 (Shakspeare's Americanisms). 

Hours at Home: 5.361 (Review of " Queen's English," 
by F. W. Shelton). 

International Review : 8.472 (" English Language in 
America," by Lounsbury) ; 8.596 (do.). 

Lakeside Monthly : 3.154. 

Lippincott's Magazine: 3.310 (Provincialisms, by 
Henry Reeves) ; 4.345 ; 5.545 (by N. S. Dodge) ; 
19.513; 31.378 (Review of Freeman in Longmans'), 
44.121 (mugwump). 

Literary World : 14.364. 

Littell's Living Age : 20.79 (Review of Bartlett, 
from Boston Advertiser) \ 95.218 ("Inroads upon 
English," from Blackwood, as above) ; 100.636 
(Review of Zincke's " Last Winter in the United 
States," from Spectator) ; 114.446; 120.240 ("United 
States English," from Chambers' Journal); 132.821 
(from Leisure Hour) ; 155.483 (Freeman's Longmans' 
article) ; 179.298 (The Great American Language, 
from Cornhill Magazine). 

Magazine of American History: 12.564 (C. L. 
Norton, Political Americanisms); 13.98 (do.); 13.- 
199 (do.) ; 13.295 (do.) ; i3.394(do.) ; 13.495 (do.) ; 
13.599 (comments on foregoing). 



American English. 2^2 

Nation : 5.428; 6.392 ; 11.56 (Pennsylvania provincial- 
isms) ; 11.72 (do.); 14.28 (Savage Review of De 
Vere); 14.45 (Review of Hoosier Schoolmaster); 
16.148 (North Carolina provincialisms) ; 16.183 
(do.); 1 7. 1 13 (Words from Indian languages); 18.380 
(Review of Barringer) ; 21.8 (Penn. pro.); 26.171 
(Review of Bartlett) ; 26.243 (Review of Bartlett) ; 
32.184 (blizzard) ; 32.208 (do.) ; 32.220 (do.) ; 32.260 
(do.) ; 49.15 (Review of Farmer). 

National Quarterly Review : 2.230 (Review of 
Pickering and Bartlett). 

New England Magazine : 6.583 (shows New England 
provincialisms to be old English). 

New Englander : (N. S.) 3.429. (No. 157, July, 1880.) 

New York Tribune: Aug. 14, i88[ (Proctor) ; May 17, 
1884 (G. W. Smalley on Sala on Tucker) ; Sept. 29, 
1894 (Smalley). 

North American Review: 3.355 (Review of Picker- 
ing) ; 69.94 (Review of Bartlett) ; 91.507 (Review 
of Marsh's Lectures) ; 136.55 (Tucker, American 
English); 141.431 ("Slang in America," by Walt 
Whitman); 146.709 (lagniappe and brottus) ; 147.102 
(brottus) ; 147.348 (brottus, buckra, goober) ; 147.475 
(lagniappe and brottus). 

Putnam's Monthly: 16.519 ("The American Lan- 
guage," by W. W. Crane). 

Rural New Yorker : 49.231 (North Carolina provin- 
cialisms). 

Scribner's Monthly : 3.379 (Review of De Vere). 

Southern Literary Messenger: 2. no; 14.623 (Re- 
view of Bartlett). 



234 O^^ Common Speech. 

Southern Review : (N. S.) 9.290 and 9.529 ('' Ameri- 
canisms, a Study of Words and Manners " ; an 
elaborate essay, in review of Bartlett's and Web- 
ster^s dictionaries, and various other books ; unduly 
severe upon American English ; author evidently 
prejudiced). 

%* For other references, see Dialect Notes (Am. Dialect 
Society, Edward S. Sheldon, secretary, Cambridge, Mass.,) 
Part I. p. 13, Part II. p. 80, Part V. p. 254. 

%^ The author will be greatly obliged for additions or cor- 
rections to this list, or to any other part of the book. Instances 
of the customary use in Great Britain of '' American " peculiar- 
ities of speech will be especially welcome. Please address at 
Albany, N. Y. 



INDEX. 



Abacus, 138. 
Abet, 61. 
Abominable, y'^. 
Accomplice, 61. 
Account, 204. 
Addicted, 59. 
Admiration, 35. 
Aggravate, 17, 137. 
A good few, 187. 
Airy, 204. 
Alley, 204. 
All-fired, 204. 
Allow, 158. 
Allspice, 204. 
Almond, 164. 
Ambassador, 169. 
American, 140. 
Ampersand, 204, 
Ancestor, 169. 
Animadvert, 67. 
Animosity, 61. 
Apology, 72. 
Apparent, t,2>. 
Appointable, 204, 
Apt, 59. 
Arbor, 169. 
Armor, 169. 
Arrant, 68. 
Artful, 70. 
Assist, 175. 
Audacious, 73. 



Bachelor, 169. 

Back out, 204. 

Backward, 205. 

Bade, 185. 

Baggage, 205. 

Baiting, 205. 

Balk, 205. 

Bang up, 205. 

Barbarian, 48. 

Barefaced, y2>' 

Bargain, 174. 

Bark, 205, 

Base, 50. 

Beast, 51, 177. 

Beef, 205. 

Being saved, renewed, offered, 80. 

Beldame, jt,, 

Beliked, 205. 

Belongings, 205. 

Bilberry, 205. 

Bilk, 205. 

Bindweed, 205. 

Bits and bridles, 82. 

Blackguard, 52. 

Blaze, 205. 

Blizzard, 211. 

Blocks, 159. 

Blue-blooded, 205, 

Bluefish, 205. 

Bode, 67. 

Bogus, 213. 



236 



Index. 



Boohoo, 205. 
Boom, 214. 
Boor, 47. 
Bootjack, 8, 9. 
Bowling alley, 205. 
Boycott, 225. 
Brat, 53. 
Bright, 206. 
Brought, for put, 80. 
Brown, 114. 
Brummagen, 206. 
Buck, 137. 
Buck against, 214. 
Bucket, 158. 
Bully, 206. 
Bumper, 173. 
Bushwhacking, 72. 
Busybody, 65. 
By-and-by, 75. 
By and large, 206. 
By-product, 140. 
By way of, 181. 

Caboose, 206. 
Caitiff, 49. 
Calculate, 158. 
Can, for may, 218. 
Canaille, 215. 
Careless, 60. 
Carouse, 58. 
Carry on, 206. 
Casket, 215. 
Casuistry, 72. 
Catastrophe, 66. 
Cattle, 34. 
Caucus, 175. 
Censure, 67. 
Centenary, 133, 137. 
Chance, 206. 
Chautauqua, 167. 
Cheat, 70. 
Check, 168. 
Chess, 206. 



Chilling, 176. 
Chipper, 206. 
Chronic, 66. 
Churl, 47. 
Cider, 168. 

Circumstance, 26, 137. 
Claim, 134, 158. 
Clever, 206. 
Color, 170. 
Combine, 8. 
Conceit, 71. 
Condign, 23. 
Connection, 206. 
Conspire, 61. 
Cookey, 206. 
Cook stove, 8, 9. 
Coral of lobster, 215. 
Counterfeit, 41. 
Covet, 60. 
Cradle scythe, 207. 
Criticize, 67. 
Curmudgeon, 118. 

Defalcation, 70. 

Demagogue, ']i. 

Demean, 26, 133, 137. 

Denounce, 61. 

Despot, 56. 

Directly, for directly after, 189. 

Disannul, 13. 

Dissever, 13. 

Dividend, 25. 

Docks, 159. 

Dodger, 215. 

Dogma, 56. 

Draft, 168. 

Dunce, 55. 

Durst, 185. 

Egregious, 67. 
Embezzle, 70. 
Emissary, 72. 
Emperor, 169. 



Index. 



237 



Endorse, 29. 
Enjoin, 18. 
Epithet, 67. 
Equivocate, 41. 
Error, 169. 
Escalan, 159, 215. 
Esoteric, exoteric, 118. 
Evening, 158. 
Excise, 114. 
Executive session, 22. 
Expect, 158. 
Exterior, 169. 

Fad, 173. 
Fair, 124, 215. 
Fakir, 216. 
Famous, 174. 
Fanatic, 71. 
Favor, 169. 
Ferret, 114. 
Firedogs, 207. 
Flavor, 169. 
French, 216. 
Fun, 35. 
Furore, 216. 
Fussy, 72. 

Gasometer, 15. 
Give ear, 149. 
Go-cart, 8. 
Good form, 175. 
Gossip, 71. 
Got, 182. 
Governor, 169. 
Gripsack, 216. 
Grub Street, 114. 

Half-breed, 225, 
Handglass, 216. 
Harbor, 169. 
Harlot, 48. 
Have words, 62. 
Heathen, 47. 



Helpmeet, 13, 137. 
Highwines, 216. 
Homely, 66. 
Honor, 169. 
Hostler, 165. 
Hulking, 207. 
Humor, 170. 
Hunk, 207. 
Hydropathy, 15. 
Hypocrite, 40. 

Idiot, 48. 

Immediately, as soon as, iS 

Imp, 53. 

Impertinent, 23, 

Incivility, 47. 

Indifference, 60. 

Indolence, 60. 

Inferior, 169. 

Inflame, 61. 

Injuncted, 20. 

Instigate, 61. 

Institute, 216. 

Intimate, 175. 

Inveterate, 66. 

Jack at a pinch, 207. 
Jail, gaol, 168. 
Jesuitical, 'j^, 
Jew, to, 72>' 
Jug, 175- 

Keet, 217. 
Kern, 47. 
Knave, 51. 
Knocked up, 174, 

Labor, 169. 
Laid, for lain, 187, 
Legend, 44. 
Lesser, 13. 
Levy, 159. 
Lewd, 50. 



238 



Index. 



Lexicographer, 115. 
Liable, 27. 
Libertine, 72. 
Listing, 217. 
Love, 58. 

Manageress, 15. 
Mean, 50. 
Meddlesome, 64. 
Meet in, 181. 
Menial, 53. 
Merchant, 27. 
Metaphor, 169. 
Minion, 53. 
Miscreant, 72. 
Mob, 50. 
Molasses, 124. 
Monopoly, 28. 
Mung news, 217, 
Must not, 217. 

Navvy, 173. 
Neighbor, 169. 
Nephew, 165. 
Network, 114. 
Ninepence, 159, 218. 
Notorious, 72. 
Numerous, 12, 

Obsequious, 72. 
Odor, 169. 
Officious, 64. 
Ominous, 67. 
Ostensible, 38, 
Ought, II. 
Outing, 173. 
Outlandish, 48. 

Pagan, 47. 
Paramour, 58. 
Parlor, 168, 169. 
Pastern, 114. 
Patriot, 113. 



Patron, 113. 
Peas, 168. 
Pedagogue, 55. 
Pedant, 55. 

Pension, pensioner, 113, 
Perfect, 165. 
Phantomnation, 127. 
Picked, 173. 
Piers, 159. 
Pink, 114. 
Pitch in, 207. 
Pitiful, i^. 
Plant, 175. 
Plausible, '}^%, 
Plight, 66. 
Plow, 168, 170. 
Poetess, 14. 
Pragmatical, 65. 
Predicament, 60. 
Preposterous, 16. 
Presage, 67. 
Presently, 74. 
Pretend, pretender, 42. 
Prevent, 68. 
Profane, 71. 
Progenitor, 169. 
Program, 168. 
Prone, 59. 
Proser, 72. 
Protective tariff, 24. 
Provoke, 61. 
Puritan, 114. 

Queen's English, 152. 

Randomly, 173. 

Reckon, 158. 

Rely, reliance, reliable, 5, 6. 

Repented himself, 79. 

Resent, 62. 

Restive, 22. 

Retaliate, 62. 

Riding, 177. 



Index. 



239 



Rife, ^z. 

Right, rights, 207. 

Ringleader, 72. 

Rival, 69. 

Rode, for ridden, 187. 

Rot, 175. 

Round up, 219. 



Safe, 207. 
Sauce, 207. 
Savage, 47. 
Savior, 169. 
Schedule, 165. 
Senator, 169. 
Sheeny, 219. 
ShiUing, 159. 
Shinny, 207. 
Shoe-horn, 8, 9. 
Show, 168. 
Sick, ill, 176. 
Silly, n^ 

Single ((XTrAov?), 81. 
Slips, 159. 
Sliver, 164. 
Smitch, 219. 
Solid-colored, 219. 
Something, 181. 
Span, 207. 
Specious, 38. 
Square, 208. 
Squares, 159. 
Stand, 207. 
Standpoint, 8. 
Starvation, 5, 
Starved, 175. 
Stepmother, 104. 
Stock, 207. 
Stop, 175, 207. 
Story, 168. 
Successor, 169. 
Sumptuary, 24. 
Super, 219, 



Superior, 169. 
Sustain, 27. 
Sweeny, 124, 219. 

Talented, 6. 
Tautology, 92. 
Temperance, 24. 
Tenderfoot, 220. 
Theory, 56. 
These kind, 184. 
Tidy, 175. 
Tinsel, 41. 
Tiresome, 175. 
Too thin, 208. 
Tophet, 209. 
Tory, 113. 

Totalling, totting, 173. 
Touch and go, 209. 
Traduce, 67. 
Traffic, 174. 
Trait, 164. 
Tramp, 209. 
Transpire, 34, 
Trap, 175. 
Trousers, 220. 
Tub, 175. 
Tund, 173. 
Tyrant, 56. 

Uncouth, 48. 
Unravel, 13. 
Usury, 70. 

Vagabond, 48. 
Valor, 170. 
Vapor, 169. 
Varlet, 52. 
Vial, 165. 
Villain, 46. 
Virago, 73. 
Voluble, 71. 
Vulgar, 49. 



240 



Index. 



Wagon, 168. 
Washtub, 8, 9. 
Well, 209. 
Wharves, 159. 
Whig, 114. 
Willful, ^i. 



Wire, 175. 
Wizard, 56. 
Wrangle, 61. 

Young person, 176. 



